Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

Questions asked Ricardo during the first few months of his stay in the United States
included:
What do we mean by question mark?
Did you ever have any trouble with your ears?
Wagner-Gough and Hatch suggest that it was this input difference, rather than the
age difference between Paul and Ricardo, that was the fundamental reason for their
differential success in acquiring English as a second language.
What could we have done for Ricardo? I can think of at least three ways Ricardo
could have been provided with simpler input in English. First, he could have been a
member of a "pull-out" class in school, either in English as a second language or in
one or more subject-matters. This segregation from native speakers of English,
distasteful to some, would have at least encouraged a simpler "teacher-talk" from
his instructors, as all students in the class would have been less than fully competent
speakers of English. Second, we could have provided Ricardo with opportunities to
meet native speakers of English (for one method, see Krashen, 1978e). These
speakers may have provided him with "foreigner-talk". A third possibility would
have been to set up some mechanism for Ricardo to come into contact with other
ESL acquirers, through an ESL or pull-out class or through some other means. As
long as such a foreign student peer group had different first languages, this would
have provided Ricardo with "interlanguage" input, another simpler code.
But would any of these simple codes have helped Ricardo acquire English? This is,
I believe, a question of immense theoretical and applied interest, as fundamental as
any in our field. On the theoretical level, it asks how acquirers acquire, or what
"intake" is. On the applied level, it asks what sorts of environments are best for
second (or first) language acquisition, a continuation of the discussion of formal and
informal environments, previously dealt with by Krashen and Seliger (1975),
d'Anglejan (1978), Tucker (1977), Stern (1978), Palmer (1978), and Chapter 3 of
this volume.
Before discussing possible approaches to answering this question, some brief
definitions are in order. We will focus on three sorts of simple codes that second
language acquirers are apt to come into
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