Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

contact with. "Teacher-talk" is the classroom language that accompanies exercises,
the language of explanations in second language and in some foreign language
classrooms, and the language of classroom management. During break, it becomes
"foreigner-talk" (see below). "Interlanguage talk" is simply the speech of other
second language acquirers, often that of the foreign student peer group. It is, of
course, fairly will described in the literature, but not dealt with as input. "Foreignertalk"
may be of two kinds. The term has been used to describe native speakers'
imitations of second language speech or, rather, their acquisition of aspects of this
interlanguage. As documented by Hatch, Shapira, and Wagner-Gough (1978), this
may happen after prolonged contact with second language speakers. It is an
extremely interesting phenomenon, but not of direct concern here. The sort of
foreigner-talk that is relevant to our discussion is the simplified input native
speakers may give to less than fully competent speakers of their language in
communicative situations. It may range from the sort of foreigner-talk described by
Ferguson (1975), aimed at very low-level speakers and characterized by
pidginization-type grammatical changes, to very mild alterations in speech.
Whether these codes help the acquirer or not is an empirical question, and it is the
purpose of this paper to suggest two possible approaches to investigating this issue.
Each approach has its weaknesses--nevertheless, combined and perhaps
supplemented, they may eventually help us to answer this basic question.
First, one can approach the question directly and ask whether acquirers who have
had access to such codes actually acquire faster, and whether those who have not
had access to these codes have had a harder time with second language acquisition.
Another approach is to determine, from analysis of simple codes, whether they are
linguistically appropriate for language acquisition. Some space is devoted below
toward beginning investigation in both of these approaches. This is followed by
discussion of some practices and attitudes in current language pedagogy.
The Gross Approach
The gross approach, or the "Good Language Learner" approach, is
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