Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

and often incorporated them into his speech. This is similar to what Clark found in
her study of Adam. Wagner-Gough hypothesizes that patterns do not directly evolve
into creative rule-governed language: "It is quite clear that there is no transfer
between some imitations and subsequent free speech patterns. For example, a
learner may say 'My name is Homer' in one breath and 'He Fred' in another, the
former being a memorized pattern and the latter the learner's own rule" (p. 71).
Thus, Wagner-Gough supports position 2.
The most complete study of routines and patterns in child second language
acquisition is L. Fillmore's doctoral dissertation (Fillmore, 1976), an exhaustive
examination of the speech produced by five acquirers of English as a second
language in an English-speaking kindergarten. Unlike Wagner-Gough, Fillmore
comes out strongly for position 3:
... the strategy of acquiring formulaic speech is central to the learning of language:
indeed, it is this step that puts the learner in a position to perform the analysis which
is prerequisite to acquisition. The formulas... constituted the linguistic material on
which a large part of their (the children's) analytical activities could be carried out....
Once they were in the learner's repertory, they became familiar, and therefore could
be compared with other utterances in the repertory as well as with those produced by
other speakers (p. 640).
All the children studied by Fillmore used routines and patterns very early and very
heavily: "The most striking similarity among the spontaneous speech records of the
five children was the acquisition and use of formulaic expressions. All five quickly
acquired repertoires of expression which they knew how to use more or less
appropriately, and put them to immediate and frequent use (p. 640). Including only
the clearest cases of formulaic expressions, Fillmore calculated that their use ranged
from 52 per cent to 100 per cent of the total number of utterances at the early stages,
down to a low of 37 percent in the most advanced performer at the end of the year.
Two children, in fact, remained nearly completely dependent on routines and
patterns even at the end of the year.
Routines and patterns evolved into creative language in a manner not unlike that
reported by R. Clark (1974). Larger units were broken into smaller units, routines
became patterns, and parts of patterns were "freed" to recombine with other parts of
patterns. This break-up
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