Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

Freed (1980) reports that foreigner-talk is "strikingly similar" to caretaker speech
with respect to grammatical complexity, as measured by the average number of S
nodes per utterance (compared to Newport, 1976). Moreover, Freed reports at least
some signs of tuning: native English speakers talking to "low foreigners" produced
utterances tending to have fewer S nodes per utterance as compared to English
speakers talking to "high foreigners", while input to both groups was less complex
than native speaker-native speaker speech.
It is probably safe to assume that interlanguage-talk is less complex than native
speaker-native speaker speech with respect to propositional complexity. 2
While the data are sparse, they are consistent with the hypothesis that these simple
codes are roughly tuned to the level of the listener, possibly to the same degree as is
caretaker speech. The size of the net might be about right, and it may be cast in the
same way, by a communicator interested in getting his or her conversational partner
to understand. For all three simple codes it may be the case that communication
casts an optimal size net.
Before concluding that simple codes are optimal for language acquisition, we need
to consider several problems. First, there are some differences between caretaker
speech and the simple codes we are discussing. Caretaker speech typically contains
high proportions of imperatives and questions, while teacher-talk (Trager, 1978) and
foreigner-talk (Freed, 1980) appear to contain a larger percentage of declaratives. Is
this a crucial difference? Also, there is the obvious ungrammaticality of
interlanguage talk. While caretaker speech also contains occasional examples of
what might be considered ungrammatical forms (e.g. uninverted yes/no questions),
interlanguage input is probably even more ungrammatical. Do the virtues of this
simple code outweigh any problems caused by these errors? Also, even if simple
codes are useful, if the acquirer hears only these codes we can expect fossilization:
teacher-talk may be inherently limited due to the limitation of what can be discussed
in the classroom, while interlanguage-talk is of course limited by the competence of
the speakers. As for foreigner-talk, not all foreign-talkers may be good "language
teachers", not all native speakers will lay down the right size "net". (Mark Twain
complained that even though he had learned
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