However, at Kololo where it was also done with sixth form students preparing for the General Paper for Higher School Certificate (See appendix 1) the work was more like Krashen's Stage 3.
When would a student reach Stage 3 and be able to concentrate on his own interests? This raises the practical question of whether a test could identify such people who ought to do Stage 2 work before being admitted to universities needing Stage 3.

The English Block method allowed students to do work on topics that interested them, but it also exposed them to a large range of genres. I think Krashen would find it hard to justify limiting input to a certain range of topics. The danger here is that of mistaking advice to let the student read material he finds interesting (which can best be done, as with the English Block, by giving him the run of the library) to serving him up with what the teacher thinks is his specialty by excluding what isn't. No person can be sure of what another person's real interests are, as they are concealed within his skull. Krashen's theory of Narrow input may reflect American institutional pressure to devise courses with a range of course-books which students will use - a desire to plan ahead what students will need although people are so diverse that this may be unwise (and as Drobnic points out#(16 )the actual students who turn up may not fit the detailed course designed).

He makes the useful observation that reading passages for students are often too short - as I have seen in American-designed course-books - because students need several pages to become used to an author's style and subject matter. In short passages he thinks they never get past the frustrating period of difficulty to the easier stage of familiarity. In the English Block the basic reading programme consisted of whole books and was aimed at encouraging the students to read right through. No short reading passages were produced specifically for students. Short reading passages tend to be produced for the circular purpose of asking comprehension questions (or because they are found in some types of examination). Reading of short pieces occurred as part of the research activities, so that there was enough motivation to encourage the students to persevere despite the difficulties.
Krashen's Stage 4 is, he says, an abstraction and a goal rather than a possible realisation because many native-speakers don't reach it. It consists of mastery of all the genres of a language.

This concept of four stages is useful for providing food for thinking about learning but, as with genres, it may not be very useful to try to define them precisely. Life is a continuum. The goal of the English Block, as with every other method of teaching English should of course be Stage 4: complete mastery.

Acquisition may no longer be the right term for what is more like a process of growth and development. In the English Block a great deal of emphasis was placed on meaning and very little on form - that is form grew out of the need to express meaning. The assumption here was that the form of expression is functional - it arises from the need to express certain ideas in certain situations - and that it is provisional rather than categorical. This means that it is not necessary to teach the students in detail how something should be done but that it will arise from the situation. (In practice this means that a word of advice over the shoulder is often enough, without going into a big production of teaching the letter form.) In some teaching methods form is treated first and meaning seems to be considered as an afterthought.

For the same reason, the language used by the students in writing and speech was the product of the need to express meaning, so that there was no need to teach, for example, vocabulary, in an explicit lesson. Nevertheless, vocabulary in the sense of usage and understanding by students increased, as was shown by the collections of writings built up in Individual Files.

Krashen is mostly concerned with students in a different situation from the East Africans. His students are usually immigrants to the United States going to take part in a Native-speaker culture. The East Africans considered here were going to use English within their own society where it had a position ambiguously different from that in a society of native speakers. (As it happened, the Ugandan Asians later found themselves in native-speaker societies.)

#(16) Karl Drobnic Mistakes and Modifications in Course Design ESP 5B/9