Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

According to Fillmore, her children did get some "mother-ese" from their
playmates, who did many things that fit the descriptions of parental modification of
language described for child L1 acquisition and informal child L2 acquisition (Clark
and Clark, 1977; Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Wagner-Gough and Hatch, 1975).
However, the overall input to these children may have been very complex, more so
than the analytic acquirer usually gets. They were also faced with classroom input
and much child input that, at least at first, they could not understand.
Fillmore's analysis shows clearly that under certain conditions the "gestalt" mode
may be encouraged to a remarkable degree. It does not demonstrate that all
language is acquired this way by all acquirers or even that the analytic style may be
totally circumvented.
Routines and Patterns in Adult Second Language Acquisition
The use of routines and patterns is reported in only one adult study to our
knowledge. (This rarity is undoubtedly due more to the paucity of data on adult
second language acquisition than to the lack of automatic speech in adult second
language performance.) Hanania and Gradman (1977) studied the English
development of Fatmah, a 19-year-old Arabic speaker living in the United States.
Fatmah had little formal schooling in Arabic and encountered English "primarily in
natural communicative settings" (p. 76). Hanania and Gradman report that at the
start of their study, Fatmah's English output "consisted mainly of memorized items
that are commonly used in social contexts with children". They also noted that "the
use of these expressions, however, does not imply that she recognized the individual
words within them, or that she was able to use the words in new combinations. They
were merely strings of sounds that she used appropriately in particular situations"
(p. 78). In other words, she knew routines.
Fatmah also used patterns in the early stages: "An attempt was made to find out if
Fatmah recognized units with sentences and could use them in new combinations,
but such activity was apparently alien to her learning strategies. Structures like
Thank you, I can't..., Do you like...?, were perceived as single units, and she resisted
segmentation.
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