Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

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the fact that as least some of the corrections were aimed at morphology. We were struck by the fact that natural orders, at least in our laboratory, were turning up everywhere, and we replicated one of the few studies that reported to give an unnatural order, Larsen-Freeman's "writing" task. The replication was successful; this task again produced a clearly unnatural order, one that was nearly identical to Larsen-Freeman's reported order. While both tasks seem to imply a focus on form (self-corrections and the writing task), there are crucial differences. In their self corrections, the composition students were not focused on a particular item or on a specific rule, and apparently did the task on the basis of their "feel" for grammaticality. Their corrections were apparently motivated by their desire to communicate. In Larsen-Freeman's writing task, which included sentences like: Last year he (work) ____________ in a factory where the subject only had to correctly inflect the verb, there might have been a greater tendency to call forth conscious rules for specific items. In other words, Larsen-Freeman's task was what is called a discrete-point test, while ours was not. This leads to the interesting hypothesis that it takes a discrete-point test to bring out conscious learning, while anything less does not, at least for subjects who have had a chance to do a meaningful amount of natural acquisition. Thus, we might expect a discrete-point test to yield an unnatural order and an integrative test to yield a natural order. So far this is what we have found. (In a previous paper (Krashen, 1976a) I suggested that integrative tests were not necessarily acquisition tests. In those days, I had only considered the time element as the necessary condition for Monitor use. This was clearly inadequate, and I thank Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt for pointing out that having time is not sufficient to ensure Monitor use, and John Oller for pointing out that my conclusions on integrative testing were premature, suggestions that are certainly confirmed by these current data.) Janet Keyfetz Fuller's dissertation (Fuller, 1978) also speaks to this point. Fuller administered the SLOPE test to adult ESL subjects in both written and oral versions. She tested the effect of first language (Indo-European versus non-Indo- European), second versus third language acquisition, and order of presentation. In general, there were no 54
significant differences for any of these contrasts. She also found no significant rank order differences between the oral and written versions, despite the fact that performers clearly had more time for the written version. (In Krashen, Sferlazza, Feldman, and Fathman, 1976, we had attempted to run a written version of the SLOPE with our subjects but could not analyze the data due to ceiling effects; we noted a clear rise in III singular rank order, however.) Are Fuller's results consistent with the hypothesis that learning is brought out only by a discrete-point test? The SLOPE test does ask the subject for an item in a slot, and to that extent it has some of the characteristics of a discrete-point test. A SLOPE item might look like: Here is a ball. (Picture) Here are two _______. (Picture) This differs in a crucial way from the example given above from Larsen-Freeman's test. In the SLOPE the subject contributes the entire item, while for many items in Larsen-Freeman's writing test the subject need only inflect a given form. This may focus the subject more clearly on form. Whether this is the crucial difference remains to be seen and can easily be tested. Also, these results may not hold for foreign language as well as second language performers. Generally, foreign language students have less access to language acquisition and rely more on learning. It would not be at all surprising if foreign language students show a greater learning effect, manifested by more "unnatural orders". Adult EFL students in other countries might provide the crucial data here. Objections to the "Natural Order" 1. Is the natural order an artifact of the Bilingual Syntax Measure? There have been some critiques and objections to this seemingly clear and consistent picture. First, several scholars have suggested that the adult natural order is an artifact of the use of the Bilingual Syntax Measure (Porter, 1977; Hakuta and Cancino, 1977; Rosansky, 1976). This suspicion was based on the following circumstantial evidence: 55
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Second Language Acquisition and Sec
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Acknowledgments I would like to tha
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Introduction This book is concerned
Page 7 and 8: performance..." (p.35). Corder (196
Page 9 and 10: when it does not get in the way of
Page 11 and 12: language (some similarities to firs
Page 13 and 14: In the second part of this chapter,
Page 15 and 16: far more valuable then the exercise
Page 17 and 18: Monitoring generally improves accur
Page 19 and 20: overconcern with correctness, howev
Page 21 and 22: language is spoken or may be expose
Page 23 and 24: 2. Attitude and Aptitude in Second
Page 25 and 26: 1973, p. 8). Carroll also suggests
Page 27 and 28: outines and patterns, and at a more
Page 29 and 30: Sentences, Paired Associates, and S
Page 31 and 32: stay-ins appeared to be integrative
Page 33 and 34: motivation played no role because o
Page 35 and 36: (1977), after interviewing teachers
Page 37 and 38: did not produce the same results. T
Page 39 and 40: a stage many people, but not all, r
Page 41 and 42: The Good Language Learner Revisited
Page 43 and 44: predict differences in student achi
Page 45 and 46: settle the issue of whether adults
Page 47 and 48: language had higher scores than stu
Page 49 and 50: Table 1. English proficiency and ye
Page 51 and 52: The "self-study" reinterpretation o
Page 53 and 54: series the evidence for learning is
Page 55 and 56: 4. The Domain of the Conscious Gram
Page 57: Ann Fathman, confirmed our earlier
Page 61 and 62: Table 1. Studies analyzing grammati
Page 63 and 64: Table 3. Counterexamples to orderin
Page 65 and 66: Table 4 (cont.) ___________________
Page 67 and 68: ut *der Katze Ohr (The cat's ear).
Page 69 and 70: Research Findings 1. First language
Page 71 and 72: First-language-influenced errors he
Page 73 and 74: and (4) Ich weiss nicht, I know not
Page 75 and 76: ain", the right hemisphere, appears
Page 77 and 78: second language acquisition in adul
Page 79 and 80: hemisphere is removed, and the pati
Page 81 and 82: Monitor, to exist, and the degree t
Page 83 and 84: advantage in the first language. En
Page 85 and 86: while English "orients its users to
Page 87 and 88: 7. On Routines and Patterns in Lang
Page 89 and 90: adulthood. A. Smith (1966) describe
Page 91 and 92: "That's a _______") which were char
Page 93 and 94: variation. Nelson, for example, dis
Page 95 and 96: which he had learned by imitation.
Page 97 and 98: and often incorporated them into hi
Page 99 and 100: what utterances mean by observing h
Page 101 and 102: Furthermore, she associated strings
Page 103 and 104: and patterns other than as discours
Page 105 and 106: similar difficulty orders for gramm
Page 107 and 108: understanding language that is "a l
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up to the intermediate level. As Wa
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practical only in a foreign languag
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is making some effort at making him
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It may be useful to distinguish thr
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the luxury of building up acquired
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marker /-s/, and the regular and ir
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to speak the language they were lea
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9. The Theoretical and Practical Re
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contact with. "Teacher-talk" is the
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language in Los Angeles. S. K. also
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Caretaker Speech and Language Acqui
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speech is so well rooted in the "he
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speech is: they are simpler than na
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Freed (1980) reports that foreigner
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e boredom. When they overshoot, the
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class was conducted entirely in Fre
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more expansions as well as repetiti
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Broen, P. (1972) The Verbal Environ
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Dulay, H. and M. Burt (1977) "Remar
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Hakuta, K. and H. Cancino (1977) "T
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Learning Aptitude. Rowley, Ma.: New
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Academy of Aphasia. Victoria, Briti
Page 153 and 154:
Smith, A. (1966) "Speech and other
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