Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

a stage many people, but not all, reach at about age 12 (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). The
formal thinker has the ability to "verbally... manipulate relationships between ideas in
the absence of prior or concurrent empirical propositions" (Ausubel and Ausubel, 1971,
p. 63). For formal thinkers, new concepts are acquired primarily "from verbal rather than
from concrete experiences" (ibid., p. 66). The formal thinker also has a meta-awareness
of his ideas and can use abstract rules to solve a whole class of problems at one time. It
is thus plausible that the ability to use a conscious grammar, requiring a meta-awareness
of language and general abstract rules, comes as a result of formal operations. (That is to
say that formal operations gives the adult a greater ability to make conscious
generalizations about language. It is not to say that children, especially older children,
have no such ability. They clearly do (Hatch, 1976; Cazden, 1975) but not to as great an
extent.) Thus, formal operations may give us the Monitor. But it also has negative
effects on language acquisition, a poor exchange that may be the cause of child-adult
differences.
According to Elkind (1970), formal operations may have profound affective
consequences. I have reviewed Elkind's argument in detail elsewhere (1975b), so I will
be brief here. Elkind claims that with formal operations the adolescent gains a greater
capacity to conceptualize the thoughts of others. This capacity, however, "is the crux of
adolescent egocentrism... (the adolescent) fails to differentiate between the objects
toward which the thoughts of others are directed and those which are the focus of his
own concern" (p. 67). In other words, the adolescent makes the error of thinking that
others are thinking about what he is most concerned with: himself. This belief "that
others are preoccupied with his appearance and behaviour" (p. 53) leads to the increased
self-consciousness, feelings of vulnerability, and lowered self-image that are associated
with this age. In our terms, it leads to an increased affective filter and a subsequently
lowered ability to acquire a second language. (Pronunciation seems to be the most
difficult aspect of a second language to acquire after this age, perhaps because it runs
"deeper into the center of the students' personality than any other aspect of language"
(Stevick, 1976, p. 64; see also Seliger, Krashen, and Ladefoged, 1975).
This hypothesis has its predictions as well.
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