The divide between receptive and productive language skills is one of the fundamental conundra of language education in general and of TESOL in particular. The ongoing debate regarding the relative influence of input (e.g. Krashen, 1989) and output (e.g. Swain, 1993) in second language acquisition and proficiency is at the heart of our investigation. Our contention is that output is vitally important to proficiency, if not acquisition, and that the principles that Krashen (1989) and others outline for extensive reading can be used to imagine a design for extensive speaking activities to enhance students’ oral production. In a six-week intensive immersion course we asked these mixed gender university students to record daily monologues on free topics with the teacher providing encouragement but no corrective feedback. At the beginning and end of the course we measured their fluency, proficiency and attitudes to judge the impact of the new pedagogy using both quantitative and qualitative measures. Even this minimal modification in the curriculum produced significantly better results in fluency, proficiency and attitude for the students in the extensive speaking group relative to the students receiving traditional instruction.