Language is social, and it must be acquired socially. Gone are the days when the purpose of language instruction was primarily to read literature in the second language. We now know that students need to be able to communicate with others, whether for career, academic, travel, family, or any other purposes.
When students are asked at the beginning of a language course what their goals are, they almost always say to be able to speak and understand it. This is why actually doing that every day in class is so important—rather than doing all the preliminaries that never quite lead to actual language learning and use.
Q: But won’t students get “bad input” if they hear it from each other?
A: Not at all! Just as children eventually sort out the rules of their first language even if they hear other children who speak in the same rudimentary way that they do, second language learners also will.
Q: What type of interaction helps learners acquire language?
A: Anything that’s at students’ level that’s interesting to them!