Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

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of routines and patterns provided the basis for syntax, while morphology appeared much later: In the development of productive structure, the children all seemed to be following the strategy of working the major constituents first and dealing with the grammatical details later.... The process of gradual analysis by which parts of formulas become freed from their original frames yields sentence patterns... in the process, some of the grammatical morphemes and processes are unnoticed and lost (p. 656). Fillmore documents many cases of these processes, and the interested reader is urged to consult her forthcoming book. We present here only a single example. Nora, Fillmore's fastest language acquirer, had these two formulas (1) I wanna play wi' dese. (2) I don' wanna do dese. She then discovered that the constituents following wanna were interchangeable, and that she could say and (3) I don' wanna play dese (4) I wanna do dese. She thus acquired the patterns "I wanna VP" and "I don' wanna VP". "Play with NP" then became a formulaic verb phrase unit" which could be used for other slots requiring VP, e.g. "Le's VP", as in: (5) Le's play wi' that one. This "formula-bases analytical process... was repeated in case after case of the children's spontaneous data" (p. 645). "Rules" came about when all the constituents of a formula were "freed". Why did these children follow such a route? This question can be subdivided into several smaller ones. First, one may ask why so many routines and patterns occurred. Fillmore points out that the linguistic environment of the classroom and playground was conducive to the learning of routines and patterns. The daily classroom routine, for example, allowed the acquirers to figure out what was being said easily--all teachers followed, to a larger extent, predictable routines. "Such language, because it is used daily and with only minor variation, becomes highly predictable. The children can figure out 94
what utterances mean by observing how they relate to activities, and by noticing what their classmates do in response" (p. 637). The children thus rapidly acquired classroom expressions which were used daily ("It's time to clean up", "Finish your milk"). Playground games also have predictable language components that can be picked up rapidly. Combined with this sort of environment, Fillmore also points out, as did Hakuta earlier, her subject's needs to immediately establish social contact via language: Further, ... the desire to maintain contact and sustain social relations with members of the group is the motivation for the acquisition of formulaic speech. ... what he (the acquirer) must do is to acquire some language which will give the impression of ability to speak it, so that his friends will keep trying to communicate with him. The use of formulas by the learners in this study played an important part in their being able to play with English speakers as they did.... This kind of language was extremely important, because it permitted the learner to continue participating in activities which provided contexts for the learning of new material (p. 670). In other words, Fillmore's subjects were under great pressure to produce early and get along in the classroom and playground. Their use of routines and patterns was due to the fact that their communicative needs exceeded their linguistic competence, and they were forced to make the most of what they had. This resulted in the tremendous use of routines and patterns observed: "The children managed to get by with as little English as they did because they made the greatest use of what they had learned--and in the early part of the acquisition period, what they had learned was largely formulaic" (p.654). A second question is whether this is the way language is generally acquired. Clearly, the sort of early output demands Fillmore's subjects had imposed on them and the routinized predictable input are not present in most language acquisition situations. As we have seen in first language and second language acquisition by children, the "gestalt" route is used by acquirers under similar conditions: where input is complex, and where conversational demands are present, acquirers may tend to use whole utterances in conversationally appropriate places without a full grasp of their internal structure. The situation Fillmore describes certainly appears to be a clear case of this. 95
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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
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performance..." (p.35). Corder (196
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when it does not get in the way of
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language (some similarities to firs
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In the second part of this chapter,
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far more valuable then the exercise
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Monitoring generally improves accur
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overconcern with correctness, howev
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language is spoken or may be expose
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2. Attitude and Aptitude in Second
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1973, p. 8). Carroll also suggests
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outines and patterns, and at a more
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Sentences, Paired Associates, and S
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stay-ins appeared to be integrative
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motivation played no role because o
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(1977), after interviewing teachers
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did not produce the same results. T
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a stage many people, but not all, r
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The Good Language Learner Revisited
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predict differences in student achi
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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 and 58: Ann Fathman, confirmed our earlier
Page 59 and 60: significant differences for any of
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 often incorporated them into hi
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
Page 109 and 110: up to the intermediate level. As Wa
Page 111 and 112: practical only in a foreign languag
Page 113 and 114: is making some effort at making him
Page 115 and 116: It may be useful to distinguish thr
Page 117 and 118: the luxury of building up acquired
Page 119 and 120: marker /-s/, and the regular and ir
Page 121 and 122: to speak the language they were lea
Page 123 and 124: 9. The Theoretical and Practical Re
Page 125 and 126: contact with. "Teacher-talk" is the
Page 127 and 128: language in Los Angeles. S. K. also
Page 129 and 130: Caretaker Speech and Language Acqui
Page 131 and 132: speech is so well rooted in the "he
Page 133 and 134: speech is: they are simpler than na
Page 135 and 136: Freed (1980) reports that foreigner
Page 137 and 138: e boredom. When they overshoot, the
Page 139 and 140: class was conducted entirely in Fre
Page 141 and 142: more expansions as well as repetiti
Page 143 and 144: Broen, P. (1972) The Verbal Environ
Page 145 and 146: Dulay, H. and M. Burt (1977) "Remar
Page 147 and 148: 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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