Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition.

"Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill." Stephen Krashen

Stephen Krashen (University of Southern California) is an expert in the field of linguistics, specializing in theories of language acquisition and development. Much of his recent research has involved the study of non-English and bilingual language acquisition. During the past 20 years, he has published well over 100 books and articles and has been invited to deliver over 300 lectures at universities throughout the United States and Canada.
This is a brief description of Krashen's widely known and well accepted theory of second language acquisition, which has had a large impact in all areas of second language research and teaching since the 1980s.



Description of Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition
Krashen's theory of second language acquisition consists of five main hypotheses:


The Acquisition-Learning distinction is the most fundamental of all the hypotheses in Krashen's theory and the most widely known among linguists and language practitioners.
According to Krashen there are two independent systems of second language performance: 'the acquired system' and 'the learned system'. The 'acquired system' or 'acquisition' is the product of a subconscious process very similar to the process children undergo when they acquire their first language. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concentrated not in the form of their utterances, but in the communicative act.


The 'learned system' or 'learning' is the product of formal instruction and it comprises a conscious process which results in conscious knowledge 'about' the language, for example knowledge of grammar rules. According to Krashen 'learning' is less important than 'acquisition'.


The Monitor hypothesis explains the relationship between acquisition and learning and defines the influence of the latter on the former. The monitoring function is the practical result of the learned grammar. According to Krashen, the acquisition system is the utterance initiator, while the learning system performs the role of the 'monitor' or the 'editor'. The 'monitor' acts in a planning, editing and correcting function when three specific conditions are met: that is, the second language learner has sufficient time at his/her disposal, he/she focuses on form or thinks about correctness, and he/she knows the rule.
It appears that the role of conscious learning is somewhat limited in second language performance. According to Krashen, the role of the monitor is - or should be - minor, being used only to correct deviations from 'normal' speech and to give speech a more 'polished' appearance.
Krashen also suggests that there is individual variation among language learners with regard to 'monitor' use. He distinguishes those learners that use the 'monitor' all the time (over-users); those learners who have not learned or who prefer not to use their conscious knowledge (under-users); and those learners that use the 'monitor' appropriately (optimal users). An evaluation of the person's psychological profile can help to determine to what group they belong. Usually extroverts are under-users, while introverts and perfectionists are over-users. Lack of self-confidence is frequently related to the over-use of the 'monitor'.






The Natural Order hypothesis is based on research findings (Dulay & Burt, 1974; Fathman, 1975; Makino, 1980 cited in Krashen, 1987) which suggested that the acquisition of grammatical structures follows a 'natural order' which is predictable. For a given language, some grammatical structures tend to be acquired early while others late. This order seemed to be independent of the learners' age, L1 background, conditions of exposure, and although the agreement between individual acquirers was not always 100% in the studies, there were statistically significant similarities that reinforced the existence of a Natural Order of language acquisition. Krashen however points out that the implication of the natural order hypothesis is not that a language program syllabus should be based on the order found in the studies. In fact, he rejects grammatical sequencing when the goal is language acquisition.


The Input hypothesis is Krashen's attempt to explain how the learner acquires a second language. In other words, this hypothesis is Krashen's explanation of how second language acquisition takes place. So, the Input hypothesis is only concerned with 'acquisition', not 'learning'. According to this hypothesis, the learner improves and progresses along the 'natural order' when he/she receives second language 'input' that is one step beyond his/her current stage of linguistic competence. For example, if a learner is at a stage 'i', then acquisition takes place when he/she is exposed to 'Comprehensible Input' that belongs to level 'i + 1'. Since not all of the learners can be at the same level of linguistic competence at the same time, Krashen suggests that natural communicative input is the key to designing a syllabus, ensuring in this way that each learner will receive some 'i + 1' input that is appropriate for his/her current stage of linguistic competence.


Finally, the fifth hypothesis, the Affective Filter hypothesis, embodies Krashen's view that a number of 'affective variables' play a facilitative, but non-causal, role in second language acquisition. These variables include: motivation, self-confidence and anxiety. Krashen claims that learners with high motivation, self-confidence, a good self-image, and a low level of anxiety are better equipped for success in second language acquisition. Low motivation, low self-esteem, and debilitating anxiety can combine to 'raise' the affective filter and form a 'mental block' that prevents comprehensible input from being used for acquisition. In other words, when the filter is 'up' it impedes language acquisition. On the other hand, positive affect is necessary, but not sufficient on its own, for acquisition to take place.

Input, interaction and second language acquisition (Rod Ellis)

Answer the following questions:

1. How exactly does acquisition take place?

A) Understanding a second language i+1 for (i.e. linking it to a meaning).

B) Noticing a gap between the second languages i+1 form and the interlanguage rule which the learner currently controls.

C) The reappearance of thei+1 form with minimal frequency.

2. Which conversational tactics are used in a Native Speaker – Non Native speaker talks?

The Native speaker – Non Native speaker were much more likely to make use of conversational tactics such as repetitions, confirmation checks, comprehension checks or clarification request.

3. Why is output important in second language acquisition?

Because producing output the students will improve their input, and it is necessary to produce it to know if they are learning or not, which are their mistakes, weaknesses and so on.  

4. Why is the reflective role of output important?

Because it provides them with opportunities to reflect on, discuss and analyse these problems explicitly.  

Match the teacher’s behavior with the proper correction techniques

A: Ignore the mistake.

B: Use finger correction.

C: Draw a time line on the board.

1. - You are working with a class of ten-year-old who are doing a fluency activity. One of the learners is talking to the class about her pet. She says: ‘My rabbit eat lettuce.’ You let her continue talking.

__A__

2. - You are doing a controlled practice activity. One of the learners says: ‘I have been working last week.’ You show her a diagram.

___C___

3. - You are focusing on spoken language and the use of contractions. A learner says: ‘I’m going swimming tomorrow.’ You want to show him where the mistake is. You use your hand.

___B___

Age and acquisition (Brown)

1. What is the difference between the terms ACQUISITION and LEARNING?

• ACQUISITION: Unconscious process that it naturally develops in communicative situations.

• LEARNING: Conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a Language

2. Why is motivation important for L2 students?

If students feel motivated they will learn easily because the LAD will be activated, and that is one of the most important factors when it comes to learning.

3. Why might foreign talk be beneficial?

Because when students think they can understand what the teacher actually says by modifying her/his own speech they will feel more motivated and this will leads students to learn TL easily.

4. What is communicative competence?

Is the way that we use to produce speech, we find three concepts of this which are:

· Grammatical competence; it is related to the accurate use of words and structures in the L2.

· Sociolinguistic competence: It enables the learner to discriminate the social context.

· Strategic competence: This is the ability to organize a message effectively and to compensate, via strategies, for any difficulties.

5. What is Positive and Negative Transfer?

· Positive transfer: when some concepts from L1 and L2 have similar characteristics, the learner may be able to benefit from the positive transfer of L1 Knowledge. For example; if students use the word doctor, even if he/she does not know that this words is equal in Spanish and English.

· Negative transfer (or interference): L1 and L2 are too different, and it is not effective for L2 communication. For example; if students say this is my carpet, referring to a folder, in Spanish, but the similitude between both languages make students do this negative transfer.

Second Language acquisition by Brown (worshop)

1. What is the difference between the terms ACQUISITION and LEARNING?

• ACQUISITION: Unconscious process that it naturally develops in communicative situations.

• LEARNING: Conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a Language

2. Why is motivation important for L2 students?

If students feel motivated they will learn easily because the LAD will be activated, and that is one of the most important factors when it comes to learning.

3. Why might foreign talk be beneficial?

Because when students think they can understand what the teacher actually says by modifying her/his own speech they will feel more motivated and this will leads students to learn TL easily.

4. What is communicative competence?

Is the way that we use to produce speech, we find three concepts of this which are:

· Grammatical competence; it is related to the accurate use of words and structures in the L2.

· Sociolinguistic competence: It enables the learner to discriminate the social context.

· Strategic competence: This is the ability to organize a message effectively and to compensate, via strategies, for any difficulties.

5. What is Positive and Negative Transfer?

· Positive transfer: when some concepts from L1 and L2 have similar characteristics, the learner may be able to benefit from the positive transfer of L1 Knowledge. For example; if students use the word doctor, even if he/she does not know that this words is equal in Spanish and English.

· Negative transfer (or interference): L1 and L2 are too different, and it is not effective for L2 communication. For example; if students say this is my carpet, referring to a folder, in Spanish, but the similitude between both languages make students do this negative transfer.

Interlanguage,

1.      Explain the five central processes with your own words.

• Language transfer, this process occur in our IL performance. It is refers to speakers or writers applying knowledge from their native language to a second language, can occur in any situation when someone does not have a native-level command of a language.
• Transfer of training, when language teaching creates interlanguage rules that are not of the L2 and which result in the way the learners were taught.
• Strategies of second language learning, e.g. simplification
• Strategies of second language communication, when learner omits grammatically redundant items in an utterance, producing ill-formed sentences.

• Overgeneralization of TL linguistic material, where the learner tries to use TL rules and semantic features in the way there would not be used by a native speaker. 

           2.   Which of these processes can be apply to you in terms of your L2 acquisition?.

Language transfer and Transfer of training 

     3.  Which aspects have you fossilized?.

•  Pronunciation: because sometimes is unconscious to pronounce words with sounds of my first language
• Grammatical: the common mistakes that someone make when use a mixture of first language rules with the foreign language

True of false (justify the false)

a)     ___F__ Unsuccessful second language learning refers to the generalization problem.

The generalization problem is found not only in second language but first language too.

b)    __F__ Storage refers to the process of recalling information that is stored in memory

Retrieval In psychology, retrieval refers to the process of recalling information that is stored in memory, and storage refers to the process of storing information in the brain, those are mental processes.

     c) __T___ some conditions that affect in the process of learning a new language are anxiety, shifting    attention and second language performance.

     d) __T___ Fossilization cannot be reversible.

How Language is shaped.

Indicate if truth or false, provide the correct info.

Chomsky claimed that:

1. We have a predisposition to speak ... T
2. We have not been genetically programmed with mental structures... F
we have been genetically programmed with mental structures.
3. Nouns, adjectives and adverbs are not use in our universal grammar... F
Nouns, adjectives and adverbs are used in all languages but their differences are where they are situated in the grammar structures.
4. We are able to learn an Alien's language... F
We do not know if we are able to learn an Alien's language, if their language violates the principles of our universal grammar, we couldn't be able to understand their language because it couldn't be understandable, because it could have different codes.
5. Skinner, Chomsky and Piaget agreed on their theories... F
They had different theories about how human being developed their language.
6. Skinner believes that a language organ can develop regarding the environment... T
He claimed that all our learning could develop it with training and experience.

Match the following pictures to the corresponding theory, and therefore author.

PIAGET... C
CHOMSKY... A
SKINNER... B

Innateness Hypothesis Activity.

Name:  Ariel Muñoz S.                                                                              

I)       Complete the following comparative table.

Mains Researchers	Lenneberg	Yule	Chomsky
Point of view.	“species-specific” behavior	Physically capable of sending and receiving sound signals in a language	It is a biological schedule Maduration of the brain as any other organ
Others.	Language acquisition Device - Ability to distinguish speech sounds. - Ability to organize linguistic data. - Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible. - Ability to engage in constant evaluation.

II)    Vocabulary.

Complete with the correct meaning the following words.

Isolation: To be in a place or situation separate form others.

Innateness: Belonging to the essential nature of something

Sleep spindle: Represent periods where the brain is inhibiting processing to keep the sleeper in a tranquil state

Complete the sentences.

1.-  Genie explored her new enviroment

2.-  Genie could not speak because she had all ready pasted her Critical period

3.-   With Genie case what Chomsky holds is refuse.

"First Language Acquisition" (H. Douglas Brown)

When infants acquire a first language, they learn one of the most complex skills of their lives and they attain adult levels of skill in many domains by the age of 5 or 6. How do they learn a system that requires mastery of the sound system, a huge vocabulary, grammatical rules, meanings, and rules for usage, as well as articulatory skill, auditory discrimination, memory storage, recognition, and retrieval. What may be innate and what learned in this complex task has long intrigued psychologists, linguists and philosophers.

In the text wrote by Brown we can discriminate three different approaches about human language acquisition, he tells us about “behaviorist approaches, natives approaches and functional approaches”, and each one has influence in the language acquisition of every human. For example in one hand we can talk about behavior approach, we can find that humans get the majority of the language from the environment surrounding us while we grow up, and it means that in our relation with other people we learn grammatical structures based in our experience and not in our studies.

Now in the other hand talking about natives approach Brown tell us that This device(language)  is inside us since we are born, and it means that we have an innately way to learn and distinguish the different linguistic properties and structures. It’s very important reveal the two greatest contributions of this hypothesis in the understanding of the first language acquisition and they are: the faculty to separate the scientific method in the explanation of linguistic structures being developed in children and the description of a consistent system in the child’s language.

There are some important issues in the L1:

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Competences refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system of language (its rules of grammar, its vocabulary, all the pieces of a language and how those pieces fit together)

COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION

Comprehension and production can be aspects of both performance and competence. Research evidence point to the general superiority of comprehension over production.

NATURE OR NURTURE

 Nativist contends that a child is born with an innate knowledge, the innateness hypothesis presented a number of problems itself.

UNIVERSALS

Language is universally acquired in the same manners and moreover that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages. Maratsos enumerated some of the universal linguistic categories under investigation by a number of different researchers.

SYSTEMATICITY AND VARIABILITY

Children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical and semantic system of language; it has been found that young children who have not yet mastered the past-tense morpheme tend first to learn past tenses as separate items without knowledge of the difference between regular and irregular verbs.

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

It is proposed by  Vygotsky claimed that social interaction, through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development.

IMITATION

The earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a good deal of surface imitation since the baby may not possess the necessary semantic categories to assign “meaning” to utterances. Researches has also shown that children, when explicitly asked to repeat a sentence in a test situation, will often repeat the correct underlying deep structure with a change in the surface rendition.

PRACTICE

A Behavioristic model of first language acquisition would claim that practice is the key to the formation of habits by operant conditioning. Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But one can also think in terms of comprehension practice.

INPUT

The speech that young children hear is primarily the speech heard in home. Linguists one claimed that most adult s` speech is basically semi grammatical, that children are exposed to a chaotic sample of language.

DISCOURSE

 While conversation is a universal human activity performed routinely in the course of daily living, the means by which children learn to take part in a conversation appear to be very complex. The child learns not only how to initiate a conversation but how to respond to another’s initiating utterance.

What is Applied Linguistics?

1.      How is Language defined?

Language is a tool considered vitally important by society, in order to communicate and interact with people in everyday’s life.

2.      What is Applied Linguistic?

The AL deals with how people use the language depending on the context.

3.      Which is different in L1 and L2 Acquisition?

The main difference between L1 and L2, is that you can get L1 by only the acquiring process whilst L2 can be acquired or learnt.

4.        What are the difference between acquisition and learning?

Acquisition                                                    Learning

- Unconscious process                                              - Conscious process

- It exists exposure                                        - It does not usually exist exposure  

5.      Which factors are part of L2 learning?

Affective factors transfer (positive and negative).

6.      What is interlanguage?

When a mistake does not belong to the mother tongue neither the target language