working together to achieve success in conversational communication is referred to as the negotiation of meaning.
During Stage II, the most convenient context for conversational practice may be in structured language learning sessions, where someone is consciously helping you to learn the language. If you have one or more persons who are employed to help you on a daily basis, those people will be accustomed to speaking with you. They will have a good feel for your current level of ability, and thus will be in a good position to make sure that what they say to you is comprehensible. There is a low stress level involved in conversing with a familiar person in a familiar setting, when compared with conversing with all the people you happen to encounter out in the world at large.
In addition to formal language sessions, you will increasingly be able to engage in conversation with friends. For them, conversing with you is hard work at this point, so it requires some commitment on the part of your conversational partners. But again, people who know you well will be able to communicate with you far more effectively and easily than people who do not yet know you. With time, you can systematically expand the number of regular conversational partners with whom you visit (see Thomson, 1993c). So once you are past the very early stages of language learning, an obvious way to increase your comprehensible input is to engage in a lot of social visiting. You may not be a person who normally does a lot of social visiting. If so, it will help if you can view social visiting as part of your daily work routine.
Not all of your early speaking efforts need to be in the form of two-way conversation in the strictest sense. As a matter of fact, while you are first trying to loosen up your tongue and develop some fluency in the language, you will benefit a great deal from activities in which you do most of the talking. These activities are probably best carried out in formal language sessions, where you are employing someone who understands that she is there for the purpose of helping you learn the language. I'll have more to say about these activities below. Once you gain a degree of fluency through such structured activities you will be increasingly comfortable with unstructured social visiting as a means of getting conversational practice on a grand scale. You can use your formal language sessions as a means of preparing for your general social visiting. For example, when you learn to discuss some topic in your language sessions, you can then make a point of discussing that same topic during informal social visits. You can even tell your friends, “This is what I have been learning to talk about with so-and-so”, and then go on to talk about the topic with your friends.
To sum up, Principle II is another way of saying that you learn to talk by talking. You might say that you learn how to talk by being exposed to massive comprehensible input, but ultimately you only learn to talk if you talk.
Given what we have said about Principle I, and Principle II, we might consider the following formula to come close to the truth:
Assuming you have a strategy for getting comprehensible input, and for getting conversational practice, the path to powerful language learning could hardly be more simple.
Now you may be thinking that I'm ignoring your main concern. You feel that no matter how you struggle, you are unable to get the grammar right. If you have been learning the language through a formal language course, mastering the grammar may seem to be the central challenge. Perhaps you even got low marks because of all your errors of grammar. Well, I have good news for you. Errors are great! From here on in, you get high marks for errors, at least in my book, and hopefully, in your own book, too. If you're not making errors, you're not breaking new ground. The pathway to accurate speech is through error-filled speech. I therefore suggest that you move your concern for grammatical accuracy away from center stage. Concentrate on getting comprehensible input and c