Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

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.
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