Merrill Swain

Merrill Swain is a professor emerita of second-language education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She developed the output hypothesis, a theory of second-language acquisition which states that learners cannot reach full grammatical competence in a language from input processing alone, but must also produce spoken language output. Swain is also known for her work with Michael Canale on communicative competence. Swain was the president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1998. She received her PhD at the University of California.