Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

marker /-s/, and the regular and irregular past endings. In writing, easily learned and
useful rules include punctuation (but not all aspects: rules for capitalization and
quotation marks are straightforward, but the rules for the comma and semi-colon
may need to be acquired), and some spelling rules. The use of rules of thumb can
increase accuracy in monitored performance to some extent. They will probably not
make a great deal of difference in terms of communicative effectiveness, as these
late-acquired items tend to be fairly redundant, but they will give the performer's
writing and prepared speech a more educated appearance (Kounin and Krashen,
1978).
The "structure of the language" node is an optional section for those who have a
genuine interest in the linguistics of the target language. I would personally be very
interested in such information in any language I was acquiring, and most language
science professionals, I assume, would also be interested. My impression is that
most of our students would not be as eager for this kind of information, and the
position outlined here implies that they need not be in order to gain a high level of
proficiency in the target language. It is this class that can be devoted to a
transformational analysis of the language being acquired, where the historical
development of the language can be traced, etc. Students in such an optional section
may need to be told that this information is not meant for use in actual language
performance, unless one is a "super Monitor user". 3
While the components are listed separately on the tree, we might see some
intercommunication between them: for example, some of the output of the "fluency"
component might be a domain for error correction, as an aid to learning the rules of
thumb. It makes sense to me that not all errors would be corrected: if error
correction aims at changing the student's conscious mental representation of a rule,
it follows that only those rules that are "learnable" need to be corrected, only the
rules of thumb. Also, as mentioned above, students' output in the fluency section
provides intake for other students, as does teacher-talk in the formal "rules of
thumb" section, at least in second language acquisition situations.
Conclusions
My major point in this paper is to suggest that the second language
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