In the podcast The Motivated Classroom dr. Liam Printer asks himself: is input alone enough in the world language classroom? His conclusion: it depends, but in most learning situations input alone is not enough.

For years I have been wanting to learn Swedish. When I came across a Tedtalk on polyglots in which the speaker taught herself various languages by reading Harry Potter books, I thought to have found the answer. Shortly the Swedish edition of the first Harry Potter book arrived on my doorstep. Armed with online translation tools, real paper dictionaries, the Dutch as well as the English version of Harry Potter and a notebook, I started 'reading' the Swedish book. 

I know the value of repetition, so every time I picked up the book again, I forced myself to read the two previous pages again. At the end of a chapter I forced myself to read the entire chapter again in one go. Then I would get the audiobook as well and listen and read again the entire chapter before I allowed myself to move on to the next chapter.

I have reached chapter 6. Yes, I recognize more and more words and yes, I recognize certain language patterns (past tense, word order). But during an unexpected encounter with two Swedes when I was on holiday, it turned out that I was not able to have a decent, simple, short conversation. Very little Swedish came out of my mouth and what came out was not any good.

Now, I am not a language researcher, I don't do any research and I don't write dissertations. But my personal conclusion was: no, (repeated) input alone is not enough.

I already knew the value of retrieval practices. As a Spanish teacher I apply retrieval practices in my lessons. But in my own autodidactic Swedish bubble I did not. Until today.

I selected 10 sentences with high frequent vocabulary from every page and wrote these in my L1. My task to myself was: translate these sentences into Swedish.
This way I saw my shortcomings: I made 3 errors with the past tense of 'to have' (a high frequent verb), I made mistakes with some prepositions and words of which I could have sworn were absolutely acquired in my brain, were nowhere to be found.

It's no fun making mistakes. But thanks to these mistakes I do learn. From now on I will force myself to produce output every time (after having assured myself to have received a lot of input first) to see how I can improve. No graded assessment, just formative assessment. Be nice to your students, allow them to make mistakes in a safe environment.