Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

Ann Fathman, confirmed our earlier results. Again, adult performers showed a
difficulty order similar to that seen in children acquiring ESL. Again, there was no
strong first language influence. Also, there was no difference in rank order between
formal learners and informal acquirers, the former groups being those who reported
having had a great deal of instruction in English and little real use, and the latter
being those who reported a great deal of real world exposure to English but little or
no classroom instruction. Our interpretation of this result was that both groups were
dependent on the acquired system, since the test did not encourage conscious
monitoring (Krashen, Sferlazza, Feldman, and Fathman, 1976).
At about this time, Roger Andersen (1976) reported a "natural order" for adult ESL
students in Puerto Rico using compositions. We also undertook a composition study
soon after (Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum, and Robertson, 1978): in our study, we
asked ESL students to write under two conditions, "fast", in which they were told to
write as much as possible in a short time (in the style of Brière's 1966 "Quantity
before Quality" study), and "edited", in which they were encouraged to go over their
work carefully. We found a natural order in both conditions, with only small
evidence of a contribution from the conscious grammar in the edited condition. Our
interpretation of these results was that students were concerned with communication
when writing rather than with form; apparently the "focus on form" condition for
Monitor use discussed earlier (see Introduction) is more crucial for bringing out the
Monitor than is the "time" condition: our subjects did indeed have time, but they did
not use it for the conscious grammar, for conscious monitoring. This is not to say
they did not edit--it does imply that when they do edit, they do not use their
conscious knowledge to any great extent when communication is the issue.
A more recent study confirms this, and suggests that it may take a very special kind
of task to encourage subjects to use the Monitor. (This is not to say that we feel
Monitor use in inherently good. We are interested here in the theoretical question of
when people use it and when they do not.) Noel Houck, Judith Robertson, and I
have just completed a study in which we asked USC ESL students to transcribe
their own speech and then to correct their own transcripts. Both activities show a
natural order for grammatical morphemes, despite
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