Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

the luxury of building up acquired competence through an extended silent period,
without early speaking demands.
Learning
The "program tree" contains two lower nodes under the "learning" node, one for
rules that may be used by the optimal user for editing, and one for more difficult
rules that some students may enjoy learning about. As I have pointed out in
previous papers, there is no necessity of providing any conscious learning in the
"acquisition" section of the tree. Despite the (completely untested) claims of the
"cognitive code" method, there is no evidence to support the claim that conscious
learning needs to precede acquisition (Krashen, 1977a). We see performers who
have known a (late-acquired) rule for years, but who still fail to consistently "get it
right" even after thousand of repetitions. Such performers may have acquired a great
deal of English but have simply not yet acquired all of it, and there remain some lateacquired
items "to go". For example, our subject "P", in Krashen and Pon (1975),
even after many years in the US and with her extensive formal knowledge of
English grammar, still occasionally made mistakes with the third person singular
morpheme for regular verbs in the present tense. These errors were in casual speech:
in writing she was able to use her conscious grammar and make the necessary
correction. This morpheme happens to be one that is generally acquired late in
second language acquisition (Bailey, Madden, and Krashen, 1974), and it is quite
predictable that it be an item that is resistant to acquisition. 2
On the other hand, we often see performers who have acquired large amounts of a
second language with no apparent conscious learning. Monitor "underusers"
described in the literature (Stafford and Covitt, 1978; Chapter 1, this volume;
Kounin and Krashen, 1978) are typically able to use surprisingly difficult structures
and have no idea as to their formal description.
There is no denying that there is a certain satisfaction, for some of us, in knowing a
conscious rule, and I believe that this feeling may be some of the motivation for
insisting that conscious rules always precede performance--but it is important to
point out that insisting on
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