Merrill Swain is a Canadian applied linguist whose research has focused on second language acquisition (SLA).
[2] Swain is a Professor Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto.
[6] In the 1970s, immersion education in Canada centrally focused on comprehensible input, achieved by teaching school subjects in French.
[12] Therefore, Swain pushed for a “combination of emphasis on grammatical accuracy and … meaningful communication from the very start”.
[7] To remedy this, Swain suggested that teachers should design activities that “naturally elicit particular uses of language”.