Didactics - 4 : Second language acquisition

A : Canadian experiments.
Immersion
Recently, Quebec has been much in the news - Many French-speaking Canadians - but not a
majority - would like to set up an independent nation, and almost half of the people living in the
province are now of this opinion. However, for many years, Quebec has survived within the
union as a French-speaking province. The growth of the liberation movement from the 60s on
forced the Canadian government to recognise a special linguistic status for the province - the
French language was made official.
This put anglophones at a disadvantage. Many of them decided that it was in their interests to
ensure that their children should be able to speak French fluently. As they considered that the
language teaching in the national school system was insufficient, they put pressure on local
schools to provide special facilities for their children. Thus it was that from 1965 on, a
considerable number of young anglophone children (something like 10% of all English-speaking
children) were enrolled in what were called immersion classes.These classes were based upon
the idea that the best way to learn a foreign language was the 'natural way' - that is, in the same
way that a child learns its mother tongue. This means that, instead of concentrating upon the
grammar of the language, in specialised language classes, the young learner should be exposed to
the foreign language in natural situations. Instead of learning French in French classes, they
learnt mathematics, science, history and so on in French.
The results of these experiments are encouraging1
- first of all, it is to be noted that the abilities of the child in the mother-tongue do not
appear to suffer in any way - unless the written code for both languages is introduced
simultaneously.
As for the foreign language, the capacities of children who have followed this kind of
course are far superior to the capacities of those who have followed traditional French
classes. Their comprehension is, indeed, on the same level as that of young French-
speaking children
- on the other hand, they do not speak or write as fluently as young Francophones, and
they tend to avoid initiating conversations in French.
It has also been claimed that these classes have deeper cognitive effects on the children,
developing their mental flexibility. However, we need to be fairly careful about such
results - it is very difficult to know whom these children should be compared to.
Self-tuition
Even more intriguing are the results of an experiment in teaching English to young French
Canadians in the bilingual province of New Brunswick, where about one third of the population
is French-speaking. Because of the considerable expense, it was considered impossible to
provide specialist teaching for all French Canadian children in the public schools. The provincial
government decided to try out a method based entirely on input 2
Every day, in the schools chosen for this experiment, children in grades 3 - 6 ( from 8 -
11 years old) spend 30 minutes studying English. The classroom in which this learning is
done is equipped with personal tape-recorders. There are also shelves upon which are
kept a large collection of books. Each book is accompanied by a tape.
On entering the classroom, the child chooses a book, sits at a table with a tape-recorder,
and then reads the book while listening to the tape. The student chooses books from a
menu adapted to her age. She works entirely on her own - the teacher does not intervene
in the learning in any way, other than to encourage a pupil to organise her time or
materials.
After three years, the performance of the experimental groups was compared with that of groups
who had been taught by well-qualified and conscientious language teachers. It appeared that on
most measures there was very little difference between the two groups. However, on a test where
the children were asked to describe a picture, the experimental children were far superior to the
groups who had been taught by traditional methods - they used a larger vocabulary, and a more
flexible syntax than did the others.
Furthermore, the pupils said that they enjoyed their English classes, and looked forward to the
English period in their day. They also appeared to be more autonomous in their approach to
learning. When asked what they did if there was something which they did not understand, the
majority of the traditionally taught students said that they would ask the teacher - those in the
experimental groups said that they would listen to the tape over again, or look at the glossary at
the back of the book.
Although the programme had not been fully evaluated at this stage, it does appear that children
can acquire a considerable degree of proficiency in a foreign language without benefiting from
formal teaching, from grammar lessons, and from being forced to use the language. However,
the results of a follow-up study suggested that there was a limit to what could be acquired
without a teacher, and that best results were to be obtained when the initial program was
enriched by the presence of an instructor.
Stephen Krashen's Monitor Theory 3
Now I wish to turn to a highly influential and controversial account of second language learning,
which is based on the idea that second language learning is very similar to the learning of a first
language. The account has been put forward in it fullest form by the American language teacher,
Stephen Krashen.
Krashen sees five fundamental points - which he calls hypotheses - as the basis for his language
teaching method. These are :
1. The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis
o Krashen makes a distinction between what he calls acquisition of a language -
which is much the same as the process by which a child learns his first language -
and learning, which is the procedure employed in most traditional classrooms.
Acquisition is a relatively painless process. The child hears language all around
him, and unconsciously works out the grammar. This he can do because he is
equipped with an LAD. He does not set out to deliberately learn the language.
Learning, on the other hand, is a conscious process, requiring effort specifically
directed towards analysing the target language. This is what we do in grammar
lessons, and Krashen appears to be thinking mainly of grammar when he refers to
this. A standard case would be learning the inflections of the German verb, or the
French Subjunctive.
o Now, according to Krashen, one can only be said to master a language when it
has been acquired. Formal learning may give us the rules of grammar, but it does
not mean that we will use them correctly. He points to the fact that students may
score well on formal grammar tests, but, when they are concentrating on content
rather than form, make mistakes that they do not make in the tests.
2. The Natural Order Hypothesis
The second point is that learners make mistakes, and that these mistakes are a necessary
part of language learning. These mistakes are not random, but are very similar to the
errors that children make when learning their first language. If we follow the
mistakes that students make through time, we will see that they lie in a rough sequence.
Moreover, the sequence of errors for acquired language is not the same as the sequence of
learned grammar points - some grammatical morphemes which appear simple from the
learning point of view, are in fact acquired late - the 's' of the TPS. This, according to
Krashen, indicates that there is a natural order in which learners pick up a language -
and that this order is roughly the same for all learners, no matter what their linguistic
background.
Chinese people learning English will make the same mistakes, and will learn in more or
less the same order as French people.(As we will see, there is much evidence to suggest
that Krashen is right on this point, although there are in fact differences between Chinese
learners of English and French learners of English).
The point of this observation is that these mistakes will be made in the same order
whether the learners have been taught the grammar or not, and that teaching the
grammar will not help them change the order (Krashen appears to believe that it will
not make acquisition any quicker either, but recent research suggests that while grammar
teaching does not appear to change the order, it can get the student through the different
stages more rapidly).
The Monitor Hypothesis
Krashen does not think that formal grammar teaching is entirely pointless. The formal
rule system feeds in to what he calls the Monitor - we may think of this as a minute
grammar teacher that sits inside our brains and listens to what we say, or reads what we
write and yells out whenever he hears a mistake.
The Monitor is a dangerous ally - some people over-use it, and their speech becomes
slow, and hesitant - their interlocutors are likely to give up on them, and go and talk to
somebody else. This, as we shall see, is important, because a language learner needs to
hear a lot of language from native speakers.
The Monitor is best used when we have to be very careful - when language is necessarily
formal. This is obviously the case when writing letters of application, for example, or
when speaking to a hierarchical superior in a formal situation.
Most of the time, however, Krashen suggests that we should leave the monitor
unemployed, and concentrate upon the meaning that we wish to convey, rather than on
the form of our utterances.
The Input Hypothesis
Although his overall theory is often referred to as the Monitor Hypothesis, it is this fourth
point that is crucial to Krashen's whole argument. Starting from the observation that in
what he calls Natural language learning conditions, people often go through a silent
period, when they observe and listen - this appears to be true of the baby, for example,
but is also true of adult learners in the Amazon basin - he believes that it is not language
use which is the key variable in acquisition, but language input - what the learner hears
and reads.
The most useful form of input has to be understandable - this does not mean that it has
to be one hundred per cent clear; in fact it should be just a little beyond the learner's
present capacity. If it is too far beyond, the learner will not pay attention to the input, and
if it is not far enough, the learner will learn nothing.
Krashen considers that grammar translation methods, which often graded the material to
the learner's present level, made the mistake of oversimplification. This is because :
o a) they do not in fact know what the student needs next - acquisition order
research has not yet given us full information on the basic order in which
grammar is learnt.
o b) in any one class, there will be individuals at different levels, who are needing
different kinds of input.
He suggests that, instead of fine-tuning the input, as traditional methods have been wont
to do, the modern teacher should give rough-tuned input - and a wide variety of
material, supported by visual cues and realia which give it a context within which
the learner may guess at the content. Just as parents in Bruner's model of FLA make
language comprehensible for the baby by surrounding it by ritual and regularity, so the
language teacher must make input comprehensible by contextualizing it.
The Affective Filter Hypothesis
One barrier to learning is to be found in any negative feelings that the learner may have
about the language, the method used, the institution or the teacher. These feelings may
constitute a kind of filter, which keeps the input out. It is therefore part of the teacher's
job to make language learning as free of stress and as enjoyable an experience as
possible.
Traditional language classrooms are often highly stressful places - pressure is put upon
pupils to produce language even when they do not feel ready to do so, or when they feel
they have no particular reason to say anything. There is the feeling that all language
production will be graded and used as evidence of failure and so on. This is one of the
reasons why Krashen insists upon input, rather than output.
The kind of model that Krashen puts forward here is often referred to as an input model. The
idea is that as with the young Canadian children, learners will advance in language acquisition if
they are exposed to large amounts of authentic language, language which is not specifically
graded in terms of a set grammatical progression, but which is adapted to the students interests
and reasons for learning the language. This input should be contextualized in such a way that the
learner can understand a large amount of what is being said or written without constant need to
consult dictionaries or ask to the teacher. It should be done in relaxing and friendly conditions
This is the basis of what Krashen refers to as the Natural Approach. Over the next few weeks, we
shall take the five basic hypotheses and subject them to critical observation. This will lead us to
assess Krashen's theory, and to cover a great deal of the material that researchers in the domain
of Second Language Acquisition Theory have produced since the late 1960s.
1. This account is drawn from Charmian O'Neill, 'Les enfants et l'enseignement des langues
trangres', Crdif, Didier, 1993. Although Rod Ellis concludes his discussion of the
programmes with the judgement that 'there is now general agreement that immersion
programmes are very effective in promoting L2 development in an educational setting, there are
some discordant voices - e.g., Hector Hammerly, 'French Immersion : Myths and Reality',
(Destelig, Alberta, 1989), who argues that the French acquired by immersion students is more
correctly characterised as a pidgin, and that the typical student fossilizes badly.
2. This experiment is described in Patsy Lightbown, 'Can they do it themselves? A
comprehension-based ESL course for young children', in Courchne et al. (eds),
'Comprehension-based Second Language Teaching', University of Ottowa Press, 1992. When the
children were followed up in secondary school, it was found that at this later stage, they
benefited from tuition.
3. For the following account, I have mainly relied on Stephen D. Krashen, 'Principles and
Practice in Second Language Acquisition', Prentice-Hall, 1987, and Stephen D. Krashen, 'The
Natural Approach : Language Acquisition in the Classroom', Prentice-Hall, 1988. Critical
reviews will be found in Rod Ellis, 'The Study of Second Language Acquisition', OUP, 1994, in
Vivian Cook, 'Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition', Macmillan, 1993, and in Gass and
Selinker, 'Second Language Acquisition : An Introductory Course', Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1994.




Didactics - 5 : Critique of Krashen I
The Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis
A : Recap
We have seen that
according to Krashen, learning an L2 is very much like learning an L1. No conscious
effort needs to be made to focus on the language as such, but if people pay attention to
the sense of what they are hearing or reading, the ability to speak and to write will come
more or less of their own accord .
We looked at an interesting experiment - Canadian primary school - French through
immersion - producing children who had a native-level comprehension both in listening
and reading, who had an excellent accent and who were favourable to the community
whose language they had studied.
But - it did not seem to give them the firm grasp of grammatical structures that were
necessary for the production of well-formed utterances and of texts at native-speaker
level.
This seems to stem from the fact that :

o - the children were not expected to speak in full sentences
o - the teachers and other pupils could always interpret what they meant by reference to
the context.
o - they did not have the formal French lessons that would have drawn their attention to
the need for correct syntactic form.
So - this suggests that Krashen is wrong in at least two of his hypotheses.
a) The Input hypothesis - productive behaviour on the part of the learner is not necessary
to language acquisition. If we mean by acquisition the ability to produce correct
utterances, both orally and in writing, we suspect that he is wrong.
b) Also seems to be wrong when he suggests that learned language - the rules of grammar
- are only of much use when writing - people do seem to need the rules in order to speak
in well-formed sentences. This may lead us to believe that the first hypothesis itself - that
of the distinction between learning and acquisition - is an oversimplification.
Nevertheless, if we look at Krashen's hypotheses, they may provide us with a framework within
which a number of crucial questions can be asked.
B : The Acquisition/Learning hypothesis
We have seen that this has been criticised as an oversimplification. We can ask the question :
'How is language stored in the brain, and in particular, how is a second language stored in the
brain?'
Krashen does not really tell us :
a) what the process of acquisition is. (How does the learner build up a usable model of
second language behaviour from input alone?)
b) why learned information is not accessible in the same way as acquired information
It is feasible that the distinction between learned and acquired knowledge is in fact more
properly a distinction between two stages of the learning process. We are ready to agree with
Krashen that the two are distinct kinds of knowledge because we have usually forgotten how we
ourselves shifted knowledge from the conscious to the unconscious domain.
A rival hypothesis about learning comes from the work of Anderson, and other cognitive
scientists. According to this perspective, learning is a process of assimilation whereby new
information is processed by the brain in such a way as to be incorporated in already existing
knowledge.
We may conceive of the brain as having two different types of memory :
1. Short term memory - or working memory - a finite storage space We use it to carry
information while we make use of it. The information may come from external input - a
telephone number, that we memorise long enough to make the phone call - or from -
2. long-term memory - items are stocked in associative networks - thus the word 'home' will
carry with it a whole series of associations - depending on our experience, our culture and so on.
For learning to occur, the information that is in short term memory must be incorporated in
the network system. This may occur by simply adding it to a set of already existing associations
:
- the child learns that Eskimos live in igloos, and adds that to the conception that he has of
home.
- or it may need a major reassignment of links between different concepts
- when we learn that nearly 50% of murders take place within the home or are committed by
members of the family, our concept of home changes radically, is linked to the possibility of
violence and conflict, rather than simply the old log fire and mum cooking something nice in the
kitchen.
Anderson distinguishes also between two different kinds of knowledge :
1. Declarative knowledge
This is conscious, and is stored as a series of statements or images. It is knowledge about the
world - who is the President of France, for example, or the fact that 'move' is a verb, whereas
'movement' is a noun.
2. Procedural knowledge
This is unconscious, and consists of routines or procedures that allow us to bring declarative
knowledge into use. Thus, our procedural knowledge of our mother tongue permits us to
construct grammatically correct sentences without consciously thinking about it.
For Anderson, learning takes place in three stages :
1. the Cognitive Stage - learner receives instruction, or watches an expert, or studies the question
on his own - conscious effort, and - knowledge is formulated in a series of rules - conscious
factual statements which Anderson refers to as 'declarative knowledge'.
For L2 learning, this would include the rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary, as
well as chunks of useful language that can help us out in specific situations.
At this stage, the learner can describe the rules, but does not use them skilfully -
performance is hesitant, and there are many errors.
For Anderson, the model of L2 learning is the classroom, and the Cognitive Stage
corresponds to being instructed by a teacher - the expert. You may also think of learning
to drive, with an instructor. You learn how to use the clutch, how to learn the gear-lever,
how to use the brakes and so on. The knowledge is there, but the learner may not be able
to use it. Thus, as Rod Ellis suggests, the learner may know that the word 'drowned'
consists of 'drown' + 'ed', but not be able to construct the word in conversation.
2. The Associative Stage - two things occur :
o a) errors in the declarative statements are detected and eliminated
o b) connections between the different elements of the skill are strengthened
This implies that, from being declarative, the knowledge becomes procedural. Thus the
learner's knowledge abut 'drown' and 'ed' will be linked to his knowledge of 'save' and 'ed'
and will be subsumed under a single production rule for producing the past tense - and
indeed, the rule may be overgeneralized and used to produce 'goed', for example.
The initial declarative representation is not always lost - we still remember the rules -
but we no longer need to apply them consciously. This may be why Krashen can point
to the existence of two separate systems - the old system, taken on board at the first stage
of learning, remains, but is not directly used in language production.
Performance begins to resemble expert performance, but may be slower. Instead of
thinking of the clutch, the gear-lever and the brakes separately, we now mould them
together into a non-verbalised procedure.
3. The Autonomous Stage :
- skill becomes virtually automatic and errors disappear. It can now be executed without
attention - driving a car and having a conversation at the same time. With a complex skill,
this stage takes a long time to reach.
At this point, the conscious declarative knowledge may be lost - if you ask a competent
driver to tell you how he drives, he may be unable to tell you - which is why we have
specially qualified driving instructors, and also why the fact that you are a speaker of
French does not qualify you as a teacher of French as a foreign language!
The acquisition of the skill - like any other skill - depends on learning and practice - in
this, Anderson differs radically from Krashen. For Anderson - the rules which we learn
when acquiring a second language = rules of grammar as taught in class.
However, other observers have pointed out that this is hardly likely to be the case.
1. First of all, many people learn foreign languages without going to classes and without begin
presented with the formal rules.
2. Secondly, the rules that are presented in class are by no means all the rules that are needed
to speak a foreign language well.
3. Finally, not all foreign language classes actually present the rules of grammar, and yet
members manage to acquire the language.
So what does happen? It seems that individuals generate their own rules. Thus what is needed,
it may be claimed, is not a class in which rules are dictated and learnt by heart, but what Gagn
refers to as 'cued performance' and opportunities for practice.
This involves :
- modelling by an expert - the expert shows how it is done - the language teacher shows how to
produce correct and/or comprehensible statements.
- active attempts by the learner to produce the activity himself - with the instructor cueing him
at moments when he forgets the rules - think of the father running alongside the child who is
riding a bicycle for the first time, and shouting instructions
The learner tries out the activity before possessing it completely. She is thus able to learn from
her successes and her mistakes - learning by trial and error.
This is formalised as the construction and testing of hypotheses. Based on input, or on her
understanding of the rule pronounced by a teacher, or whatever, the student makes a prediction
about the effect of using a rule that she has generated. She can then test this through :
1. Reception - compares the hypothesis to further input.
2. Production - uses the hypothesis to generate language, and then assesses the result.
3. Metalingually - consults a native speaker, or a grammar book.
4. Interactionally - makes an intentional error to elicit a repair from a native speaker.
It will be seen that this view is in opposition to Krashen's input hypothesis. It is not sufficient for
the learner to simply accumulate input - he or she must actively engage with the activity.
There are also problems with this account - in particular, the claim that is made in this tradition
of cognitive science is that the learner proceeds through trying out hypotheses and receiving
feedback. However, as we have seen - this is certainly not the case in FLA, where children do
not tend to copy their parents' speech, and where parents do not inform their children when they
have made a grammatical error.
Furthermore, the model has not as yet demonstrated how rules of language can be stored in a
way that makes them usable by normal procedures - Chomskians argue that this failure is due to
the fact that linguistic knowledge is not structured in the same way as other forms of knowledge.
Finally, these models rely on repetition and strengthening of the knowledge networks - but the
child manages to learn the rules of her language with very little repetition. Furthermore, it does
not explain why children and adult learners of an L2 make predictable, sequenced errors, which
they have never heard, nor how it is that children avoid errors, when they have heard no evidence
to suggest that the structures not employed are erroneous.
C : Conclusion
We have seen two models of SLA. One of these, which its author claims is based upon
Chomsky's account of FLA, and central to which is the idea that language learning is a special
skill, posits that SLA is similar to, if not exactly the same as FLA, and that the learner does not
have to direct any conscious effort towards the language itself. Language lessons should, in fact,
be about something else - something that the student wants to study, in which he is interested.
This approach underlies the growing movement in educational establishments to have courses in
one or other subject area given in a foreign language. As we have seen, in Canada, this means
young anglophones learning French through doing maths. In Scandinavian universities, all
science teaching is done in English.
The other model also assumes that SLA is similar to FLA - but does not agree that language
learning is in any way different from other kinds of learning. Moreover, it suggests that work on
the formal aspects of language is necessary, and that the learner needs to be given the rules of the
language. Students need to be encouraged to build up their own rules, and to pack them into
networks, where they will become available for work by procedural routines. This may leave the
impression that speaking a language is effortless - but the conscious effort is mainly made during
the first phase of learning.
In Anderson's model, and in particular in the work of those who have followed it up, the learner
is expected to do the work for him or herself, and thus it is that the learner needs to be
encouraged to develop specific learning strategies. We shall return to this question later on in the
course.
Next week, we shall look more closely at the second of Krashen's hypotheses - that is the idea
that the grammar of a language is learnt in a natural order.
Didactics - 6 : Critique of Krashen II
The Natural Order Hypothesis
A : Recap:
We have seen that Krashen's first hypothesis - that there is a distinction between conscious
learning, on the one hand, and unconscious acquisition on the other, and that the latter is far more
effective in enabling people to use an L2 - can be criticized :
1. It oversimplifies the cognitive processes of learning, and draws too rigid a distinction
between acquisition and learning:
2. It is based mainly on the observation of learners acquiring an L2 that is generally used
in the surrounding environment - that is immigrants to the US learning English. In other
situations one may expect classroom learning, of the conscious kind, to be important.
In looking at cognitive processing, we have considered the work of Anderson, who distinguishes
three phases in the learning process
1. the Cognitive Stage - learner receives instruction, or watches an expert, or studies the
question on his own.
2. The Associative Stage - two things occur :
o a) errors in the declarative statements are detected and eliminated.
o b) connections between the different elements of the skill are strengthened
3. The Autonomous Stage - skill becomes virtually automatic and errors disappear. The
skill can now be executed without attention - driving a car and having a conversation at
the same time. With a complex skill, this stage takes a long time to reach.
Gagn suggests that the rules that the learner uses are not necessarily the traditional rules of the
grammar class, but are rules that he constructs for himself through observation, interaction, and
the construction of hypotheses. This idea leads us on to consider Krashen's second hypothesis -
the natural order hypothesis.
B : The Natural Order Hypothesis:
Krashen makes several claims about what he calls the 'natural order'. Some of these are strong
claims, with a high degree of falsifiability. Others are more general and of less interest. Let us
have a look at the idea more closely.
The American psychologist, Roger Brown, who investigated the acquisition of a first
language by young children, discovered that they assimilated a number of grammatical
morphemes in a predictable sequence.
o Grammatical morphemes are those like 'the', 'of', or 'is', and the 's' of the genitive, the
plural, and the 3PS. At first, children tend to leave them out, using only the lexical
morphemes to produce sentences such as :
'Here bed', or ''Not dada'.
When they do acquire them, they appear to do so in a specific order.
Krashen, using the research of colleagues Dulay & Burt, suggests that, just as there is a
natural sequence in the way children pick up their own first language, with certain
grammatical morphemes being acquired before others, so there is for second languages.


Average Order of Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes
for
English as a Second Language (Children and Adults)

ING (progressive)
PLURAL
COPULA (to be)

IRREGULAR PAST
AUXILIARY (progressive)

ARTICLE (a, the)
REGULAR PAST
IlI SINGULAR (-s)
POSSESSIVE (-s)
(NOTES: (from Krashen & Terrell)
:
1. This order is derived from an analysis of empirical studies of second language
acquisition in a 1981 study by Krashen. Most studies show significant correlations with
the average order.
2. No claims are made about ordering relations for morphemes in the same box.
3. Many of the relationships posited here also hold for child first language.

Some of the morphemes have the same rank order as for first language acquisition, but some do
not. In general the bound morphemes have the same relative order for first and second language
acquisition (-ing, Plural, Ir. Past, Reg. Past, III Singular, and Possessive) while Copula and
Auxiliary tend to be acquired relatively later in first language acquisition than in second
language acquisition.) According to Krashen, this order is found only when the subjects use the
L2 in light monitoring situations - thus we do not find it in students' answers to formal grammar
test questions, when the 3rd person Singular, for example, is reproduced correctly at quite an
early stage.
The studies by Krashen himself, and by Dulay and Burt have been criticized by a number of
other observers.
To begin with, it is not clear how we decide whether a morpheme has been acquired or
not - the fact that a learner uses a specific grammatical feature does not necessarily mean
that he uses it in an appropriate fashion, or that he understands how it works. As Krashen
himself recognizes, a learner may use the feature in one context and not in another.
Moreover, the studies carried out by Krashen's associates have all been cross-sectional -
that is, they have studied different learners at different points in their career: other
longitudinal studies, following the same learners through various stages of the learning
process, have not always found a similar progression.
A more damning criticism is that, although the findings might indeed be true, they are not
open to any theoretical interpretation - this is in large part because there is no evident
linguistic relationship between the different items. Some of them are free morphemes,
whilst some are bound. They pertain to different areas of grammar - the morphology of
the main verb, the morphology of the noun, the auxiliary verb 'to be' - and there is no
attempt to show how they may be related. They are thus divorced from the system of
English grammar, and grammar is nothing if it is not systematic.
At the moment, we may say that there are strong reasons to believe that there is indeed
some kind of an order in the acquisition of certain grammatical morphemes, but not of all.
There is perhaps a stronger case to be made out for the existence of 'developmental sequences'.
This refers not to the fact that one morpheme comes before or after another, but that a certain
rule is acquired gradually, that the learner makes certain predictable mistakes at each stage in
the learning process, and that these mistakes follow a similar order whatever the mother tongue
of the learner.
Let's see how the negation is put in place by learners of English as an L2. What we see here is
that, like the child learning her mother tongue, the adult L2 learner will produce utterances that
he has never heard from her teacher or from a native speaker. Instead, they build up their mastery
of the negation through successively using a series of self-generated rules, many of which
display a similar simplification and over-generalisation to that used by the child. Thus, first
attempts at negation would be :
No very good.
No like it.
Then the learner moves on to place the negativizer inside the utterance :
I not want to.
He no can speak.
She don't come.
In a third phase, the learner attaches the negation to modal verbs, although without necessarily
analysing the utterances :
I can't play this one.
I won't go.
Then in a final phase, negation follows fully English rules, although mistakes may occur in tense
uses.
Individual learners may go through the phases more or less quickly, and some never reach the
final phase at all. In this case, we often speak about 'fossilization' - for some reason or other, the
learner makes no further progress. In fact, this may be seen as a perfectly rational judgement on
the part of the learner, who decides that any further investment in perfecting his grasp of the L2
will not pay sufficient dividends in added communicative and social power.
C : Implications for teachers
We may gather from the above that L2 learning is similar to L1 learning in a number of ways,
but is not exactly alike. In particular, whereas all normal L1 learners achieve fluency, the
majority of L2 learners do not, even if they have lived in an L2 environment for a long time. The
reasons for this are not always clear, but may, in part, be due to personality and attitudinal factors
as much as to any intrinsic difficulty in language learning.
a) Unlike children learning their first language, adult and adolescent learners do not have an
overwhelming need to learn an L2.
b) Adults and adolescents do not have the time to consecrate to language learning - they
also need to learn other subjects - in school - to work and earn a living, and so on. Their
concentration is more limited.
c) Adults and adolescents may have invested heavily in their first language, and regard it
as being a part of their basic personality. To speak another language fluently would be to
change their personality:
Teachers will need to take all of these possibilities into account. A student who is no longer
progressing may very well have perfectly rational reasons for her failures. The teacher needs to
make it worth the learner's while to continue learning.
Another consequence of the above is that learners are themselves implicated in constructing their
language. They make their way to mastery through a number of intermediate stages. These
stages, following Selinker, are referred to as 'interlanguage'. Interlanguage differs from one
learner to another, and will show the following features :
- interference from the L1. The amount of interference will depend upon the similarity of
the two languages, and upon the context within which the L2 is learned.
- developmental features intrinsic to the L2 - natural order and developmental sequences.
- avoidance and communicative strategies - the learner may avoid certain linguistic
features with which he or she does not feel comfortable, and use circumlocutions in order
to express the desired meanings.
The errors that the student makes are a natural part of the learning process. Krashen implies that
there is very little that we can do other than encourage the learner to form his own hypotheses,
and to continue along the 'natural pathway' to mastery - or at least to the level of master which
satisfies him. However, other observers have noted that classroom teaching may help the learner
go through each stage in the process rather more quickly, even if it cannot enable him to beat the
system.
This implies that it can only be done through a rigorous identification of the present needs of the
student - it is no good trying to get the learner to correct errors which are as yet beyond his
competence. The teacher needs to work in concert with the learner to determine what features
should be worked on, and to make the learner conscious of the hypotheses and strategies that he
uses in communicative situations.
D : Conclusion
Krashen appears to be on stronger ground in his second hypothesis. However, his conclusions as
to teaching strategies do not necessarily follow from his premises : formal learning, if directed to
the specific problems that a learner is encountering, can benefit the learner and lead to a more
rapid progress through the 'natural stages'.
On the other hand, we may conclude that Krashen's insistence that the normal 'lock-step', whole-
class teaching of grammar is of little value is well-founded. Traditional grammar teaching - that
is, imposing the linguists' grammar on the learner whether or not he needs it - does not have any
appreciable effect on L2 acquisition. A fruitful teaching strategy would be to help the student
construct his or her own grammar, or rather to construct a series of intermediate grammars,
gradually approaching full mastery.























Didactics - 9 ; Critique of Krashen V
The Input Hypothesis
A : Recap
We have looked at the concept of interlanguage and of fossilisation, and we have seen that
according to theorists such as Selinker and Ellis, language learning proceeds through a series of
intermediary languages, with elements being at times in competition with each other. Through a
process of elimination and elaboration, the learner progresses, testing his or her hypotheses about
the L2 in a variety of ways. The great danger lies in fossilisation - and it appears sometimes that
all learners reach a stage at which they fossilize unless there is a radical change in aspects of
their environment related to SLA. We may derive from these propositions the idea that mistakes
on the part of the learner are a necessary part of the learning process, but that they should be
surveyed by the teacher for signs of fossilization.
B : The input hypothesis
It is now time to consider more closely Krashen's idea that language learning is propelled by
the receptive skills rather than by the productive ones. He holds, we remember, that the
typical learner goes through a silent period, when they absorb the language, and that later they
begin to produce, but always at a lower level of competence than their understanding. Krashen
himself says :
The Input Hypothesis maintains that increased input will result in more language acquisition,
and that increased output ... will not. ... there is no clear evidence that more output, written or
oral, results in more language acquisition.
A correlate of this position is that when teachers correct output, they do not help the student.
Krashen quotes numerous studies that tend to suggest that error-correction has no or little effect
upon learner's competence. He cites a study by Cohen and Robbins (1976) that concluded that
correction of advanced ESL students' papers over a period of 10 weeks had no significant effect
on student errors. In a study by Lalonde, the teacher followed a policy of total error correction,
followed by special exercises - students kept track of their errors on an 'error-awareness' sheet.
According to Krashen, the effect was very small, with 10 of the 30 students actually getting
worse. Nevertheless, Lalonde goes on to recommend a policy of total correction - in the control
group, using grammar-based instruction including error-correction, 22 out of 30 actually got
worse.
Krashen acknowledges that learners themselves often say that they want to be corrected, both
when in a learning situation and when in ordinary conversations with native speakers (Cathcart
& Olsen, 1976). Chenoweth et al found that learners said that they liked to be corrected by native
speakers during ordinary conversation. However, Cathcart & Olsen went on to look at the real
effect of error correction, and found that when teachers tried to provide constant correction, the
learners did not like the resulting communication.
As we might imagine, Krashen's position is hotly contested. There are broadly two kinds of
objection to the input hypothesis.
1. Krashen talks abut 'comprehensible input'. It is not at all clear what he means by this.
o a) He appears sometimes to mean that the input should be written or spoken in such a
way that the language itself is comprehensible to the student - hence he refers to
Motherese, caretaker language and foreigner talk. This kind of speech, he says, is
'roughly tuned' to the learner's language level, and tends to get more complex as the
learner progresses. In this case, it is the language input itself that is modified.
o b) On other occasions, he stresses that the language used must be backed up with a
scaffolding of environmental clues - pictures, gestures, objects and so on, which make
the meaning clear. In this case, it is the context, the environment, that is modified.
The problems with the first interpretation are :
o - K claims that this is what happens in natural language learning situations -
however, as we have seen, in some cultures, children are not addressed directly until they
are capable of 'giving information' themselves - and yet they manage to learn the
language.
Indeed, it has been suggested that middle class mothers use less Motherese than do working class
mothers, and that this results in their children having a greater grasp of the language.
o - if the theory is taken seriously by language teachers, it may lead to the learner's being
subjected to substandard or language poor samples of the L2 - the Mrs Plornish
syndrome.
(i) Foreigner talk is often of an ungrammatical and misleading nature. 'You comprenez,
monsieur?'.
(ii) Ferguson has noted that many of the features found in Foreigner talk are also found in
pidgins.
(ii) It also happens that, just as we tend to slide into the accent of the person we are
talking to, so native speakers adopt the errors of the foreigners that they are speaking to,
as a kind of semi-conscious goodwill gesture.
o - moreover, learners are often irritated by 'foreigner talk', as they feel that it expresses
contempt. Lynch found that some learners objected to the speech of one of their teachers
because they felt that he was 'talking down' to them.
o There is a danger that teachers who oversimplify their language for the learner will not
sufficiently well equip her for the experience of full communication with native speakers.
Learners sometimes complain that, after their first contact with native speakers,
they realise that they have learnt nothing, even though they used to get good marks
for their classroom language.
The second interpretation - modifying the context - may lead to the learner getting such rich
extralinguistic clues that she does not have to bother to master the language
o - the learner gets by by behaving as if they have understood the language, whereas in fact
they have read the environment - this appears to be what happens in some immersion
programmes - producing classroom pidgin
o This may be a problem with techniques such as TPR. Some of the learners do not
listen to the language used to give the orders, but watch the teacher and their classmates,
and use the clues and cues given by them to work out what they should do.
2. Although most theorists now accept that it is desirable to offer a far richer range of
input, and that teachers should be spending more time on the receptive skills than
has heretofore been the case. But - many feel that to abandon output altogether would
be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Output of some kind is seen as a necessary
phase in language acquisition. There are two kinds of arguments put forward here :
o a) - on the one hand, the teacher needs the output from the student in order to be able to
judge the learner's progress, and adapt material to her needs - this is, as it were, a
minimalist argument. It is only by correcting your written work, that I can come to some
idea of which students need to revise which grammar points.
o b) - on the other hand, it could be argued that it is when the student is called upon to
produce language that he will feel a real need to reorganise and elaborate upon his
knowledge of the L2 . Jacqueline Boulouffe, for example, holds that :
- it is only through the student's production that we can check whether she has fully
understood the input or not, and that without this verification, there are a number of
errors, particularly 'avoidance' errors, that are never cleared up. According to her,
these errors are deep-rooted, and come about because language cannot be understood as
simply a surface phenomenon.
The learner will understand the simplest form (l'association simple) - thus 'You must
listen to the music' is understood as 'Vous coutez la musique' - when confronted with an
utterance that demands processing of a more complex kind.
In particular, she points to the issue of modality, or the speaker's specifying her
position vis--vis what is being said. (This she refers to as 'l'association double')
But not only does production allow the teacher to check the learner's competence.
Boulouffe suggests that personal production, which allows the student to reorganise
his knowledge of the language in an authentic attempt to communicate, is essential.
It is only when the learner speaks or writes that she is compelled to take modality into
account.
Il ressort de tout ce dveloppement que les deux activits de comprhension et de production
gagnent s'imbriquer plutt qu' se succder. L'une prendra le pas sur l'autre selon que
l'association simple ou l'association double est en vue : la comprhension favorise l'association
simple, lie l'objectif, au lexical, au pragmatique; la production favorise l'association double,
lie au subjectif et l'intriorisation. La mme dichotomie se retrouve, d'ailleurs, dans les
instruments de mesure : les tests de comprhension tendent valuer l'interprtation
pragmatique, alors que les tests de production tendent valuer la capacit structurale (Flynn
1986).
Le langage est constamment tiss d'associations simples et d'associations doubles. S'il est
naturel que les associations simples ne soient produites qu'aprs avoir t comprises, il est peut-
tre moins naturel, mais tout aussi probable, que les associations doubles ne soient vraiment
comprises aprs avoir t produites : c'est en ce sens que la production peut rejaillir sur la
comprhension. L'appropriation s'enclenche plus srement au lieu rel de rencontre d'une demi-
expression produite avec un demi-souvenir reproduit, qu'au lieu alatoire de rencontre entre ce
qui est compris avec ce qui reste comprendre. Si tant est qu'on vise la matrise totale du
langage et non la seule comprhension, on voit mal comment la position de l'enseignement ax
sur la comprhension peut se justifier : remettre la production plus tard quivaut postposer
l'accs la subjectivit sans laquelle le langage reste hors d'atteinte. Mme si la comprhension
cre le terrain de l'apprentissage, la production en constitue probablement le moteur principal.
J . Boulouffe, Les vitements de l'enseignement ax sur la comprhension, dans
'Comprehension-based Language Teaching', Courchne et al, p. 192.
o Similarly, Swain argues that learners need the opportunity to use the L2 meaningfully,
because when they are faced with communication failure, they are forced to make
their output more precise, coherent and appropriate. She claims that when students
focus on comprehension, most of the work is done at the semantic level - top-down
processing - while when they focus on production, they must work at the syntactic level -
bottom-up processing.
Swain bases her argument on the experience of immersion classes. When she and her colleagues
observed interaction in a French immersion classrooms in 9 grade 3 and 10 grade 6 classrooms,
they found that less than 15% of students' utterances were of more than a clause in length,
and only 19% of grammatical errors were corrected 'often in a confusing unsystematic way'.
These arguments suggest that, if comprehensible input is necessary, then so also is
comprehensible output. The learner should be forced to produce comprehensible
language, and this in turn forces her to focus upon form.
Ellis distinguishes three ways in which the listener may behave when faced with a
communication break-down. They may :
o - demand clarification.
o - demand confirmation - 'Do you mean ...?'
o - repetition
Pica found that of the three, the first was the most useful, as it ensures that the learner has
to reformulate their utterance. Pica and colleagues also found that comprehension
increased when meanings were negotiated. This implies that it is important that input
and output stages are not radically separated - the learner needs to be able to
interact with the input, either through direct negotiation, in the case of oral input,
or through mediated negotiation. Pica et al compared the effects of three types of input
on the ability of 16 low-intermediate ESL learners to understand oral instructions :
o - unmodified input - the authentic text or recording of an authentic dialogue.
o - premodified input - simplification and greater redundancy - the specially created text, or
dialogue, or the highly adapted text.
o - interactionally modified input - begin with unmodified input, but given the chance to
demand clarification. (This should not be understood as simply reading the text through
in class, and listening to the teacher's explanations).
It was the third of these that resulted in the greatest comprehension. Some care needs to
be exercised about the result, because it may simply be that in the third case, learners
benefited from greater quantity rather than greater quality.
Tanaka & Yamazaki discovered that opportunities to modify input interactionally not
only increased comprehension, but also resulted in greater vocabulary acquisition.
This kind of finding is backed up by the fact that active students usually acquire language
faster than passive ones - although the reasons why this should be so are not altogether
clear.
We will remember that one of the points made by Boulouffe was that without output,
teachers cannot identify learners' problems. Lydia White is of the same opinion - she
suggests that whereas learners do hear or read what can be done through processing
input, they get negative evidence about what cannot be done - the learner cannot simply
assume that if she doesn't hear some particular structure or usage, that it does not exist ;
certain of their overgeneralizations, for example, will not be disconfirmed. It is only
when they produce language, and are corrected by a teacher or a native speaker,
that they will discover that they have made an incorrect inference.
She also suggests that if input is too easy to understand, the students will not make
progress. It is through recognising that they do not understand a passive sentence, for
example, that learners are forced to make the effort to acquire more language - input
should by no means always be comprehensible.
Conclusion
Krashen's input hypothesis is, once again, an interesting starting point, but does not prove fully
satisfactory. As Mclellan puts it, he has done language teaching a favour in drawing teachers'
attention to the fact that previously courses were overly based on grammar, and did not provide
the amount or the variety of input that was needed. But it oversimplifies considerably the
processes of acquisition, begs the question of how input aids acquisition, and plays down the role
of production.






















Didactics -11 : Critique of Krashen VII
The Affective Filter Hypothesis
A : Recap
Last week, we looked at Krashen's Monitor Hypothesis. We saw that, according to Krashen, the
formal, class-taught kind of knowledge that can be summed up in grammatical rules, can only be
used after our utterances have been presented to us in fluent form by the acquired system. That
is to say that this knowledge can be used to monitor our production, correcting our mistakes.
The monitor can only be used when there is enough time, when the speaker or writer is thinking
about linguistic accuracy, and when she knows the rule. We saw that these three conditions -
particularly the last one - are difficult to fulfil. Krashen implies that it is counter-productive to
use the monitor in normal conversation, .
Like the other hypotheses, this one has been criticised. I cited the criticisms that arise out of
studies done on good learners. These studies have tried to identify the strategies used by people
who are successful at learning foreign languages. Most of the studies that have been carried out
in this tradition have shown that the good learner is someone who pays attention to grammatical
form, and that they use monitoring as part of the learning process, listening to and correcting not
only their own production, but also that of others.
These studies have in their turn been criticised. It can be pointed out that the 'good' learners are
those who have been identified as such by teachers. Teachers use grammatical knowledge as one
of the criteria by which they determine who is and who is not a good student. They also tend to
react positively to the kind of student who shows that she thinks about her learning. It may be
that what these studies have uncovered are simply the characteristics that lead teachers to label
students positively. This does not necessarily mean that these are the characteristics that naturally
lead to good language learning.
The process may, indeed be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy - that is to say that teachers
identify students who behave in particular ways as being most likely to succeed, and so behave
towards these students in a particularly positive and encouraging was. This, in turn, leads to these
students enjoying their lessons, looking forward to them, and working harder. So, in fact, what
happens is not that the school rewards these students because they succeed, but that these
students succeed because school rewards them. This brings us to Krashen's last hypothesis -
B : The Affective Filter Hypothesis.
Krashen points to the importance of motivation, self-confidence and anxiety. He holds that these
factors are more involved in constructing the acquired system than in learning - they are more
strongly related to achievement as measured by communicative tests than by formal language
tests. He writes : -
The Affective Filter Hypothesis captures the relationship between affective variables and the
process of second language acquisition by positing that acquirers vary with respect to the
strength or level of their Affective Filters. Those whose attitudes are not optimal for second
language acquisition will not only tend to seek less input, but they will also have a high or strong
Affective Filter - even if they understand the message, the input will not reach that part of the
brain responsible for language acquisition, or the language acquisition device. Those with
attitudes more conducive to second language acquisition will not only seek and obtain more
input, they will also have a lower or weaker filter. They will be more open to the input, and it
will strike "deeper". (Stephen D. Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second Language
Acquisition, Prentice Hall International, 1987, p. 31
The Affective Filter is the basic reason why people fossilize. From this hypothesis, Krashen
deduces that :
... our pedagogical goals should not only include supplying comprehensible input, but also
creating a situation that encourages a low filter ... The input hypothesis and the concept of the
Affective Filter define the language teacher in a new way. The effective language teacher is
someone who can provide input and help make it comprehensible in a low anxiety situation.
(Krashen, Principles and Practice, p.32)
Let us turn to the three basic factors that underlie the Affective Filter.
Motivation
It seems evident that a motivated student will learn better than one that is not. But what do we
mean by motivation, and how might we measure it? Moreover, do we conceive of motivation as
being something that the learner already possesses, prior to her arrival in the classroom, or is it
something that is subject to change? And in the latter case, what can we do to change it in a
positive way?
General considerations :
Psychologists distinguish between :
basic motivations - hunger, thirst, sexuality, and so on - and
psychological motivations, which, although they may be derived from the former,
through conditioning and learning, are not so directly tuned to survival and reproduction.
We should also note that, according to Freudian psychology, motivations are not always
conscious, and negative or positive feelings about a given activity may be only indirectly related
to the activity itself. For example, Louis Wolfson, a schizophrenic, learned foreign languages
such as German, Hebrew and French, compulsively, so as to escape from the sound of his
mother's voice.
According to expectancy value theory, motivation is a function of :
o a) expectancy - that is, the belief concerning the probability that a certain course of action
will be followed by a particular outcome)
o b) valence - the value that the individual attaches to the possible outcomes of his actions.
Thus,
- if the most probable outcome of an action is also highly valued, then the motivation is
high.
- if, on the other hand, either the likelihood that the action will be followed by success is
poor, or the most probable outcomes are not highly valued, then motivation will be low.
However, it should be noted that psychologists do not believe that behaviour is necessarily
initiated by such calculations - the calculations help direct the behaviour once it has been
embarked upon.

Motivation and SLA
In Second Language learning, the main work has stemmed from the interests of Gardner, whose
work began on language learning in Canada. Gardner distinguishes between :
o - integrative motivation
a learner has in interest in learning an L2 because of a 'sincere and personal interest in the
people and culture represented by the other language group.
- instrumental motivation
here the learner has an interest in learning an L2 because of the practical advantages that
will accrue to s/one who speaks it.
In his early work, Gardner found that there was a consistently positive correlation between
integrative motivation and L2 achievement. However, it was pointed out by other observers
that :
o 1. Gardner's concept was in itself difficult to pin down.
Thus, Muchnick and Wolfe (1982) found that the 337 American high-school students of
Spanish that they investigated had motivations that could not be clearly distinguished as
either integrative or instrumental.
How would you class a desire to learn Spanish so as to go to Mexico on holiday?
o 2. He had worked with learners in bi-lingual Canada, where conditions might be such that
integrative motives were powerful. Perhaps in other cultures, instrumental motivation
might prove to be as effective.
Oller, Baca and Vigil (1977) found that amongst a group of poor Mexican women living in
California, those who rated Anglos positively were less successful in learning English than were
those who rated them negatively. This lead Oller and Perkins to suggest that some learners may
be motivated by a desire to manipulate the speakers of the TL - they referred to this as
Machiavellian motivation.
It has also been found that in countries where there is likely to be little contact with Native
Speakers, but where the language is necessary for business and career purposes, instrumental
motivation can be more powerful than integrative motivation. This was true of Tagalog speakers
in the Philippines, and of non-westernised women living in Bombay, for example.
How does motivation influence behaviour in such a way as to lead to more effective language
learning?
Gliksman found that in his sample of anglophone students learning French in Canadian
high schools, the pupils who had higher integrative motivation also
- received more questions from teachers,
- volunteered more answers,
- gave more correct answers and
- received more positive reinforcement.
Neiman et al (1978) found a similar pattern - but strong instrumental motivation had
similar effects.
It should also be pointed out that although common sense suggests that these behaviours
should lead to better language learning, no study has yet conclusively shown that they do.
Ramage (1990), however, did discover that US high-school students were less likely to
drop out of language classes if they reported an interest in the target culture, and a desire
to gain proficiency. They attached low importance to fulfilling curriculum requirements -
that is, to instrumental factors.
Finally, let us note that Kruidenier and Clement (1986) found no evidence for
integrative orientation as an important factor. Indeed, they stress that motivations
differ according to both the situation of the learner, and the language being learned -
learners of Spanish, for example, being more motivated by travel orientations, while
Canadian francophone learners of English were more influenced by friendship
orientation.
Motivation in the classroom
Gardner's conception of motivation is that it is in some way prior to the learner's
seeking out tuition. But teachers would suspect that the learning situation itself
has some effect on motivation - that is, that the teacher's own behaviour can either
positively or negatively influence the learner's desire and willingness to learn and
continue learning the language.

In-class motivation may be of the purely instrumental kind. Dunkel (1948) offered
financial rewards to learners of Farsi ; the results were positive, but not significantly so.
In a more recent experiment, Gardner and McIntyre found that when they offered a
reward for a French English vocabulary-pairing task, students concentrated more, and got
better results than did those who were not rewarded. However, the behaviour only lasted
as long as the reward was offered, so although the results are positive - at least in the
short-term - they do not have a carry-over effect.
Motivation - learning, or learning - motivation?
Most of the studies we have looked at so far were correlational, rather than causal
- that is to say, they found that higher motivation was correlated with higher
achievement, but did not show in which direction the causality ran.

Strong (1984) looking at Spanish-speaking kindergarten children learning EFL, found
that fluency preceded inclination to associate with target-language groups, so that the
ability to speak the language actually lead to integrative attitudes, rather than the other
way round. Savignon found that the desire to learn French amongst American students
increased with gains in proficiency. Hermann (1980) who had similar results, put forward
the Resultative hypothesis, which claims that motivation is caused by progress and good
results, rather than the other way round. Ellis suggests that this line of causation may be
particularly applicable where learners have low initial motivation.
Intrinsic motivation
But is it simply success that leads to motivation - in which case, we are stuck with the
problem of motivating students whose progress is slow - or is there something in the
course content that can affect the desire to learn? Could there not be some kind of
motivation related to the kinds of tasks that learners are expected to do in class?
McNamara suggests that communication itself is an important motivation - learners
acquire motivation from the need to express themselves, and from the pleasure that they
feel when they achieve this. This means that classes that provide opportunities for
communication are going to have a more positive effect than those that do not - but also
poses the question of what real communication consists of. Interest increases as the
learners are made responsible for their learning activities.
Bachman (1964) found that involving learners in the decision-making processes lead to
increased motivation, and to increased productivity.
Gardner, Ginsburg & Smythe (1976) compared the effects of two kinds of programmes
on 25 learners of French as a Foreign language in a Canadian university. One of the
programmes was characterised as traditional, with lockstep teaching and an emphasis on
grammatical accuracy. The other, which they called innovative, had individualised
instruction, and opportunities for free communication. Students in the second programme
appeared, on self-report, to have a greater desire to excel, and had a more positive attitude
towards both their teacher, and towards learning French.
Motivation - a summary
To sum up the comments on motivation, we have seen that although some investigators
have made much of the distinction between integrative and instrumental motivation,
seeing the former as more efficient than the latter, a great deal must depend on the
specific situation of the learners. We may also distinguish between background
motivation, which the learner brings with her to the learning situation, and those
motivations that are provided by the classroom itself. While the teacher may do very
little about the former, she can have an effect on the latter, both in her choice of
approach, and in her personal style. As Mary Finocchario put it :
Motivation is the feeling nurtured primarily by the classroom teacher in the
learning situation. The moment of truth - the enhancement of motivation - occurs
when the teacher closes the classroom door, greets his students with a warm,
welcoming smile, and proceeds to interact with various individuals by making
comments or asking questions which indicate personal concerns.
Self-confidence
We will recall that Krashen also referred to self-confidence as one of the variables that
affected the Affective Filter.
Self confidence as basic character trait
Self-confidence as a general characteristic is often linked to family variables.
Families who display inconsistent discipline, or over-severe discipline and
disapproval of their children produce people who have a low self-image and little
confidence in themselves.
On the contrary homes where parents are strongly approving of their children, and
of their friends, who join in many activities with them, and who have regular but
not rigid routines, and where standards of behaviour are open to discussion
produce children who are confident of themselves.
Self confidence as a variable
However, once again, self-confidence can be variable. Thus, one study of
American adolescents found that young males who were failing at school tended
to have a low self-image, but if, in the subsequent year, they became delinquent,
their self-image improved. This implies that a variety of factors may affect self-
image, from family through school to peers.
Once again, we will note that the relationship between success and self-image
may not necessarily be all one way. Although there are reasons to believe that
children who have a good self-image may do better than those who have a poor
self-image, there are also grounds for believing that a child's self-image can be
undermined by poor results at school.
One study on the relationship between self-confidence and FL learning was
carried out by Clement (1986) who investigated 293 francophone students at the
University of Ottawa, who were learning English. The integrative orientation had
no effect on language outcomes - the best predictor was self-confidence.
Anxiety
Anxiety, the third factor mentioned by Krashen, is also multiple in its forms and in its
origins. Psychologists distinguish between
trait anxiety
this is a permanent disposition to be anxious. Once again, it appears to be related
to upbringing, and indeed may be closely linked to self-image.
state anxiety
here the anxiety is linked to a specific moment in time, within a specific situation.
It may be relational, being linked to specific persons - a particular teacher, for
example.
situational anxiety
this is aroused by a specific type of situation or event - examinations, public
speaking, or classroom participation.
Examinations of learner diaries suggest that anxiety does accompany language learning
in several of its aspects.
Bailey, after examining 11 such diaries, found that the learners tended to become
anxious when they compared themselves with other learners in the class and
found themselves wanting. Their anxiety decreased as they became more
proficient.
Ellis & Rathbone, in their examination of learner diaries, discovered that some of
the learners found teachers' questions threatening, and claimed to freeze up when
interrogated. The greatest anxiety was found to be associated with the oral skills.
Oxford found that some learners were anxious about losing their identities in the
target culture. This lead to emotional regression, panic, alienation and a 'reduced
personality'.
None of the above studies demonstrated that anxiety was necessarily negative in its effect
on learning. It has been discovered that sometimes students who are anxious do better
than those who are not. Higher levels of anxiety may be associated with higher levels of
risk-taking, so that those who actually attempt to produce more difficult structures may
report more anxiety than those who are content to remain at a lower level of attainment.
(Kleinmann)
Albert and Haber distinguish between facilitating and debilitating anxiety. The former
is positive in its effects, pushing students on to make greater efforts, while the latter
frightens the student off task. It may, of course, be more a matter of the intensity of the
feeling, than of its quality.

Conclusion
Within a school system the amount of motivation that children bring into the classroom
with them is highly variable. It depends both on age and on family background factors.
Younger children may be less firm in their cultural and national identities than are
adolescents, and therefore keener to open themselves to other cultures. Middle class
parents may encourage their children to learn a foreign language more, seeing the need
more clearly, and also accompanying their children on visits to foreign countries, or
paying for them to take part in exchange visits and so on.
In-school factors will also influence motivation. While we do not usually pay children to
learn, we do give them grades, and other marks of approval or disapproval. Children who
do not obtain good marks perceive themselves as failing, and may therefore make less
effort. Unfortunately, we are unable to escape completely from our function of
classifying children into achievement bands, but nevertheless, we should do our utmost to
enable them to measure their progress, and to make a positive judgement on the work that
they have done.
The work itself must also bring satisfaction. Clearly defined tasks, which are both
interesting and sufficiently challenging to give the child the sentiment that s/he is making
progress, are of the utmost importance. Giving the children responsibility for their own
learning is important, and they can be encouraged to participate in such decisions as what
texts, subject areas and tasks they will engage with.
Opportunity for meaningful communication is also necessary. At best, this should include
exchanges with schools in English-speaking countries - and language teachers should be
willing to use such technology as the Internet. As a minimum, it should involve role-play,
group problem solving and well-structured discussions.
Anxiety should be of a low level, and should be attached to the need to communicate,
rather than to personality factors, or the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Teachers can make a difference in motivation, in anxiety levels and in the self-image of
the student. Respect your pupils, listen to them, and take note of what they say. They will
respond more efficiently to your teaching.


Didactics - 13 : Evolution of the Human Brain
A : Introduction
For the next few weeks I want to talk about the psychology of the learning process, and in
particular about the psychology of the adolescent. But before I do that, I would like to stop for a
moment and consider how the human mind emerged through the process of biological
evolution #1. . The story that I am going to tell you is largely speculative, and should be taken as
illustrative rather than factual. I would like to believe that it will lead you to reflect about the
place of language in human society - about its functions and its functioning.

B : The Human Animal
To understand the human being, we need to begin with the fact that he is an animal. We have
evolved. Evolution works through selection. If an animal is born with a characteristic that makes
it more likely to survive than its brothers, sisters and cousins, it will have more offspring. The
gene that gave it that characteristic will spread through the population, and those who do not
possess the gene will gradually die out. But evolution can only build upon what exists - we carry
traces in our bodies of the conditions that shaped our ancestors. Sometimes, these traces appear
to have no function at all for us now - the appendix, for example, does not seem to do anything
that we need, but is very useful for herbivorous mammals such as the rabbit. Sometimes the
function has changed; an ape's feet provide him with a second pair of hands, which he uses for
grasping objects and for climbing trees. Man uses his feet for standing on and walking. This
shows us that evolution is an opportunistic process; often accidental characteristics can be
transformed into central ones - human beings are among the animals that are designated
neotenic- that is to say that we mature slowly, and in fact retain many juvenile characteristics
well into adult life. One of these is a large head - and hence, a large brain - we have large brains
not because they fulfilled any particularly useful function, but because neoteny fulfilled a useful
function, and the large brain came with it #2.
We are mammals - that is to say that we are descended from small, furry creatures that were
mainly nocturnal - thus avoiding being stomped on by dinosaurs. For reasons that we will see,
these creatures became more intelligent - or at least developed larger brains - largely because of
their nocturnal habits. We are monkeys - that is to say that our ancestors were arboreal creatures,
swinging from tree to tree, living mainly off fruit. It is thanks to the monkeys' way of life that our
forebears developed 3-D vision, were able to see in colour, and developed that marvel of genetic
engineering, which sets us and our simian cousins apart from all almost other animals - the hand
with an opposable thumb.
We then found ourselves ejected from the forests, living out in the open, in competition with the
large specialist predators such as the leopard and the lion. We ate what we could find - the
powerful jaws and large teeth of our ancestors were developed for grinding grain and roots,
rather than tearing flesh. But humans became omnivorous - meat began to make up a
considerable part of their diet - today, hunter/gatherer peoples obtain about one third of their
nutritional resources from animal protein. This also had an effect on the way that we are.
C : Pathways to the human brain
To understand the mind, we may as well start with the brain - although, as we shall see, the
human mind cannot be simply equated with the brain. If we look at the lower vertebrates, such as
fish and reptiles, we may see that they have a relatively small brain - on average, about one
quarter the size of the mammalian one. Reptiles' main information input system is visual, and a
large part of the processing for visual information actually takes place in the eye itself, which is
well equipped with nerve cells. As reptilian life developed, two broad branches could be
identified; one of these was highly successful, and gave rise eventually to such creatures as the
dinosaurs. The other branch was rather less successful, and evolved into creatures that mainly
subsisted at night - these were the animals that evolved into mammals.
The original mammals were small, nocturnal creatures. Obviously, vision could no longer play
the role that it does for reptiles, and so they developed greater acuity of hearing and of smell.
There was no place for the extra nerve cells needed in the ears, or in the nose, and so it was the
brain itself that grew. Moreover, now that the animals were functioning on three input systems -
sight, hearing and olfaction - they needed to be able to integrate them, and this called for a more
complex nervous system - a bigger brain.
Eventually, the dinosaurs died out, and mammals were able to move back into the daytime world
again. This meant that they needed to develop their visual systems once again - however, there
are no backward roads in evolution - they did not go back to the reptilian visual system, but
developed larger brains, and more highly integrated nervous systems.
Amongst the mammals, certain developed an arboreal existence, living mainly off fruit. This
environment favoured three developments :
- three-dimensional vision - if you cannot judge distances, life jumping from branch to branch
can lead to nasty surprises
- colour vision - the ability to find fruit among all the greenery was important
- the opposable thumb - this helps in climbing trees - and also allows the animal to develop the
use of tools - chimpanzees, for example, use sticks and rocks as tools. It also means that the
animal can pick things up and examine them. Get someone to tie your finhers together and try
being a dog for an hour.
All of these developments favoured a lager brain, for they needed higher processing skills. Most
primates also live in groups - and, as Harry Jerison says, they are noisy animals #3. . They signal
to each other through the noises that they make - vervet monkeys, for example, have a large
repertoire of specific sounds that have regular meanings - such as 'look out, there's a snake', or
'hey, the food is good over here'. Group life puts a premium on socials skills, such as facial
recognition, understanding the emotions of others and so on, all of which demand intelligence,
and which may be one of the reasons why primates have brains which are relatively large even
for mammals.
The next stage in evolution appears to have been the expulsion of certain primates from the
forest. These monkeys took to the veldt #4. , where they were faced with the problem of finding
food in large spaces. This may be one of the reasons why hominids adopted the upright position -
it enables the animal to see over greater distances. This reliance on the visual faculty was the
more important as primates had lost much of their sense of smell while up in the trees.
Jerison suggests, in a speculative piece, that this is where language came in : whereas other wide-
ranging animals, such as wolves or hyenas, mark their territory and map their world through
smell, hominids cannot do this. He suggests that language developed in order to fulfil this
function - that is, that it was the primary evolutionary function of language to enable humans to
construct the reality within which they lived. "We need language," he says, "more to tell stories
than to direct actions" - it is not communication that is the most important job we do with
language, but the construction of mental images. This pressure towards the growth of language
would have lead to a further development of the brain, which explains why the human brain is
the largest of all the land mammals. We should be careful to take this with a pinch of salt - many
paleoanthropologists now believe that the hominid brain was already relatively large before the
development of language, and indeed it has even been advanced that language was a kind of
accidental result of the growth of the brain, which itself grew for other reasons.
Modelling the brain
Relative to body weight, then, the human brain is the largest possessed by a land animal - the
dolphin has a brain which is of similar proportions, or perhaps slightly larger. How does it work?
The big question here has been to know whether it is an undifferentiated processing machine,
like a computer, or whether different functions are carried out by different organs within the
brain. The answer that most scientists would give at the moment is that the brain is a mixture of
the two. There is a high degree of specialisation within the brain - different bits do appear to do
different jobs - but at the same time, any one task undertaken by a human being will call on more
than one area of the brain. Moreover, it now appears that the brain can be pictured in terms of
neural networks, which cover wide areas of the physical structure, and which are called into
action selectively.
If we look at the human brain from above, we can see it as being clearly divided down the
middle into two hemispheres - the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. The right
hemisphere deals with information coming from the left hand side of our sensory mechanisms -
the left hand side of the visual field, the left hand, etc. - while the left hand hemisphere deals
with information coming from the right hand side. People who have suffered brain damage to the
right hand side of the brain, for example, find it difficult to identify objects that are placed in the
left hand side of their field of vision.
The two halves of our brain, however, do not both carry out the same functions. To begin with, it
often seems that one half of the brain - the left half for most right-handed people - is dominant
over the other - that is part of the reason why one hand is dominant over the other. Certainly it
appears, that for most right-handed people, the left-hand side of the brain does most of the work
in providing that function which we think of as being most fully human - language.
This has been known since the end of the nineteenth century, for in 1861, Paul Broca, Professor
of surgical pathology at the Facult de Medecine, Paris, founder of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
(1858), Paris, and of the Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris (1859), exhibited the brain of one of
his patients, known as 'Tan' who had died the day before. Tan had suffered from aphasia - that is
to say from a partial or total loss of the powers of speech. When his brain was examined, it was
discovered to have been damaged in the posterior part of the left frontal lobe - look at the
illustration, and you will find this region labelled Broca's area. People who have lesions in this
area of the brain are able to understand what is said to them, and may read, but they are unable to
produce fluent sentences. It is as if the grammatical function had been suppressed.
In 1874, Carl Wernicke located the area in the brain that governed another speech function. A
lesion in Wernicke's area (the posterior, upper part of the temporal lobe on the dominant side)
causes a receptive aphasia. The individual may verbalise extensively, talking in gibberish with
occasional mispronounced words. The person is also unable to understand spoken or written
language : often, he does not realise what is happening to him, and so does not understand that he
is ill. Some people with this kind of aphasia become psychotic, and this could be due to their
communication difficulties.
Both the production and the comprehension of grammatical speech appear to be located in the
left hemisphere of the brain, then. For a long time, scientists referred to the right hemisphere as
the 'silent hemisphere', and it was thought to do very little. However, it is becoming evident that
the right hemisphere does have a role to play. It appears to handle spatial intelligence, for
example, and houses our musical abilities - which is why aphasics can still sing songs - but it is
also involved in the production of speech - people who cannot access the right hemisphere of
their brains produce flat, boring speech - the right hemisphere brings colour and emotion to our
language. It also appears to be responsible for our sense of humour.
This lateralizationof the brain - where the two hemispheres do different jobs - is peculiar to the
more developed mammals, and in particular the apes. It is most developed in human
beings. When we are born, it is not fully in place. If a child under the age of eight suffers brain
damage to one side, it may be able to replace the lost function, using brain areas on the other
side. Scientists refer to this as 'plasticity'. However, it does appear that this plasticity is not
complete - children who have suffered early lesions to their language producing areas do use
language differently from children who have developed normally, although these differences are
not usually noticeable in ordinary conversation.
The brain goes through considerable changes - mostly in the first months of life, but some
continue up to the age of about eight years old. It would appear, for example, that the two halves
are not fully wired together until about this age, which raises an interesting philosophical
problem as to what constitutes 'personality', and when a person can be said to possess a mind. By
the way, these changes also involve the deaths of a large number of cells - as specific routes are
set up and used within the brain, cells that do not have a function die off.
The different functions appear to set in at different periods - thus, for example, face-recognition,
which is handled by a specific, and surprisingly large area in the core of the brain, begins to
operate at a very early age. Other intellectual functions slot into place later than this, and some
specialists now think that there are probably fairly specific brain functions that come on line at
certain periods right through life. What we are interested in is, of course, the language function.
There are reasons for believing that for the basic linguistic capacities such as the construction of
grammatical utterances, there is a critical period at about eight or nine years old. The case of
Genie, which I have mentioned before, may give us some insight into this phenomenon. She
learned to speak after the age of ten. She picked up vocabulary easily, and was able to classify
objects, but she never seems to have mastered syntax, and communicated through using single
words. Moreover, her language processing seemed to be carried out by her right cerebral
hemisphere - neither Broca's nor Wernicke's areas were brought 'on line'.
This is a single case, and we must take great care in building any language acquisition theory on
it. However, it does fit in with some observations that suggest that Second Language learners
stock their L2 in the right-hand hemisphere, rather than the left - although what is meant by
'stocking' here is rather obscure. However, it should be noted that normal L2 learners, even if
they begin so learn the L2 after the age of 10 years old, do much better with the foreign language
than Genie did with her first. This leads us to surmise that if it is true that there is a critical age
for the entry on-line of the language function, then nevertheless, once it has been activated,
it remains available for the acquisition of subsequent languages.
Studies of people who have suffered brain damage lead scientists to believe that the distinction
between procedural and declarative memory is physiologically based. Damage to the
hippocampus can lead to amnesia - but what is forgotten appears to be declarative rather than
procedural. This has lead some observers to suggest that whereas some learning - procedural
learning - does occur according to the classical behaviourist model of conditioning, other kinds
of learning - declarative learning - occur through more complex cognitive processing. The
relevance of this for language learning is not evident, for there is as yet no clear picture of which
language skills, if any, are procedural, and which are declarative.
There is also considerable discussion of the nature of intelligence. Thus the American
psychologist, Howard Gardner believes that all human beings have several different kinds of
intelligence - he identifies linguistic, musical, spatial, logical mathematical, bodily kinaesthetic
and personal intelligences - which may not be correlated with each other - thus a person could
have a high level of kinaesthetic intelligence, while being low on verbal intelligence, and so on.
He cites the cases of 'idiot savants', who, for example, have low general IQ, but are very good at
numerical calculation.
Mike Anderson, on the other hand, points to the regularities in cognitive processes. He indicates
three such regularities :
1. The different cognitive abilities do tend to be correlated
2. The different abilities tend to increase with age at about the same rate.
3. Individual differences in intelligence remain relatively constant through time - bright babies
become bright adults.
He then goes on to suggest that there is a basic processing mechanism that is used by the
different kinds of knowledge system. In some people, this mechanism is relatively rapid, whilst
in others it is slower. People who process more quickly can use their working memory - which is
limited in size - more efficiently, processing more information, and losing less - so they learn
more and reason better.
He believes that there are also specific modules which deal with certain kinds of processing
necessary to life - vision, syntactical analysis, the ability to distinguish between people and
objects - these function in more or less the same way in all human beings.
Finally, there are also specific processors to handle particular learned abilities, but they work in
conjunction with the basic processor, so that although we may be slightly better at maths than at
word-play, the differences are not great. As we can see, the questions of why we are intelligent,
and of how our intelligence works are the subject of discussion and disagreement. The human
brain has been called the most complex system in the known universe, and we are far from
understanding it fully. What does seem clear is that it is both modular and unified. It has an
enormous capacity for learning. We shall turn to the question of how it learns over the next few
weeks.
1. A readable account of human evolution will be found in Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin,
'People of the Lake - Man : His Origins, Nature and Future', Penguin, 1981. If you find this
question of interest, you should read Chris Knight, 'Blood Relations : Menstruation and the
Origins of Culture', Yale University Press, 1991, which will make you very happy. Speculations
on the evolution of language are today back in vogue, after having been shunned for almost a
century : Terrence Deacon's 'The Symbolic species : The co-evolution of language and the
human brain', Allen Lane, 1997, is a stimulating example of the genre - although it makes for
tough reading. Jean Aitchison offers an account that is more accessible to the general reader in
'The Seeds of Speech : Language origin and evolution'. Robin Dunbar, 'Grooming, Gossip and
the Evolution of Language', faber & faber, 1996, offers a quirky but interesting hypothesis.
2. On neoteny, Stephen J. Gould's essay on the evolution of Mickey Mouse is helpful - see 'A
Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse', in 'The Panda's Thumb : More Reflections in Natural
History', Penguin, 1980.
3. Harry Jerison, 'The Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence', Academic Press, 1973.
4. An interesting alternative to this is Elaine Morgan's belief that humanity evolved as a semi-
aquatic creature. See her 'The Aquatic Ape : A theory of human evolution', Souvenir Press, 1990.
By this account, humanity became bi-pedal in order to wade about in rivers and lakes. Monkeys
who live on the shores do adopt a standing position more frequently than do their arboreal or
savannah dwelling relatives. (But see Jim Moore's critique)