Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

conscious rules first constrains what can be taught. Linguists readily admit that they
can describe only fragments of natural language. Second language textbooks and
teachers can probably convert only a subset of the linguists' descriptions into clear
pedagogical rules, and our students probably understand only a subset of that. If we
insist on conscious control preceding acquisition, only a small fraction of language
will be acquired. This fact is probably the reason why there is such a dearth of
second-year foreign language textbooks, and such an abundance of first-year books.
The first-year books encourage the conscious learning of easy rules, or those rules
which can be learned by most college freshmen. The second-year books attempt to
deal with the difficult rules, the subjunctive, contrary-to-fact conditionals, etc.
According to my model, these second year rules, if they are mastered, are acquired,
and only the most analytic and able students learn them. Materials encouraging their
acquisition, I predict, will be far more successful than materials encouraging their
learning.
The "learning node" dominates two subnodes, one labeled "rules of thumb" and the
other "structure of the target language". The former is learning that is actually meant
as an aid to performance, the latter is optional learning, or language appreciation.
"Rules of thumb" are those rules which the optimal user can apply to performance,
conscious rules for the Monitor. It has been suggested (Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum,
and Robertson, 1978) these rules are those that are (1) late acquired (or better, not
yet acquired), and (2) "easy" to learn. "Easy" can be defined in two ways: first, not
involving extensive mental gymnastics. A rule requiring a great deal of movement
and permutation will not be easy to learn and apply. Examples might include the
passive rule in English, or wh-questions in English. Another way in which a rule
can be called "easy" is where the semantics of the rule are straightforward. Article
use in English is simple in terms of the syntactic operations involved, but it is
anything but "easy" in terms of the subtle semantic considerations required for its
correct use. I am not prepared to supply a definite list of what rules can be taught;
this is, I think, a worthy task for the Applied Linguistics profession to pursue. I can
suggest a few examples, however. In syntax, the late, straightforward morphemes
include the third person singular ending on regular verbs in the present tense, the
possessive
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