Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

Furthermore, she associated strings with particular situations. For instance, See you
meant 'I'll be seeing you,' and it was used on occasions when her friends were
parting. Attempts to lead her to combine it with I can to form I can see you were not
only unsuccessful but confusing" (p. 79).
Ordinary analytic style grammatical development began subsequently. Hanania and
Gradman report a slow development of sentence structure and morphology not at all
unlike that seen in child first and second language acquisition: "Starting with simple
structures made up of essential substantive units, she proceeded to build up her
constructions by enlarging these units and linking them together...." (p. 82). Hanania
and Gradman's summary statement concerning Fatmah's syntactic development is
also worth repeating:
The adult in the present study proceeded to learn the language creatively. She did not
simply imitate models of the language but acquired elements selectively and built
them into syntactic units which became progressively more complex. The pattern of
her linguistic development was similar to that of first language learners. Early
constructions were constrained to two-term utterances, and the growth of sentence
complexity occurred along the same lines (pp. 87-88).
The similarity of natural adult language acquisition has been noted elsewhere in
terms of the acquisition order of certain structures (see Bailey, Madden, and
Krashen, 1974; and also Krashen 1977a).
While Hanania and Gradman do not note the disappearance or reanalysis of routines
and patterns in Fatmah's speech, propositional language appears to be independent
of gestalt in her case, as in Brown and Wagner-Gough's subjects and in Paul, the
child L2 acquirer discussed above. Language development appears to proceed
analytically, in the "one word at a time" fashion, and routines and patterns are not
mentioned after the early stages. (We are presupposing that the "gestalt" mode is
available to both the child and the adult. It is possible, however, that this mode is
manifested somewhat differently for these two classes of acquirers: the child L1
acquirer, as Peters notes, sometimes approximates whole sentences which are
characterized by "a 'melody' unique enough so that it can be recognized even if
badly mumbled" (Peters, 1977, p. 562). The adult may use routines and patterns, but
not "tunes". This child-adult difference may have a psychological-affective basis
(see Krashen, 1980a).)
Other than Hanania and Gradman's study, there are no direct data
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