Acquisition in the Natural Approach: The Binding/Access Framework

Author(s): Tracy David Terrell

Source: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 213-227
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers
Associations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/326936
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Acquisition in the Natural Approach:
The Binding/Access Framework
TRACY DAVID TERRELL
THE NATURAL APPROACH TO LANGUAGE TEACHING
suggests the incorporation of two sources of
knowledge of the target language into the teach-
ing context.1 Following "second language ac-
quisition theory" (henceforth "L2 theory") as
formulated by Krashen, the terms "acquisition"
and "learning" are used to refer to these two
sorts of linguistic knowledge.2 Acquisition is
the process which is said to lead to subconscious
knowledge about language, a "feel"for correct-
ness, while the product of learning is said to
result from conscious attention to some part of
the target language. Accordingly, in a Natural
Approach (NA) class, we attempt to provide
the students with opportunities for both sorts
of language experiences.
Emphasis in NA is given to acquisition. This
decision is based on L2 theory. Krashen hy-
pothesizes that fluency, specifically the produc-
tion of utterances, depends primarily on ac-
quired knowledge, while learned knowledge is
useful to a speaker mainly as a "monitor," a
mental processor which enables the speaker to
make corrections in an utterance before and as
it is spoken. According to this view, most
speech production is based on acquired knowl-
edge, since speakers are not able to monitor to
any great degree while engaged in normal con-
versation. Thus even if some rule of grammar
is explained, practiced, and "learned" in a lan-
guage class, this knowledge is not readily avail-
able to most speakers in normal conversation.
Krashen maintains that acquisition takes
place whenever the acquirer interacts with com-
prehensible input in the target language.3 Ac-
cording to this hypothesis it is not necessary to
"program" specific grammar points in a lesson
since, if the acquirer receives enough compre-
The Modern Language Journal, 70, iii (1986)
0026-7902/86/00003/213 $1.50/0
?1986 The Modern Language Journal
hensible input at the appropriate level, the
grammatical structures and forms will be ac-
quired in a "natural" order.
The purpose of this paper is to explore L2
theory in more detail in the context of language
teaching in a classroom. I will focus on the ac-
quisition process, attempting to describe how
I view the functions and interaction of acqui-
sition and learning for the NA class. Claims in
this paper are not based on empirical data
gathered in experimental fashion, but rather on
personal experiences teaching Spanish with
NA, observing others acquire with NA (Span-
ish, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Japanese,
Mandarin Chinese), and introspection of my
own recent experiences in NA Greek classes
here in the US and in Greece. No claims are
made for those who acquire languages in natu-
ral acquisition environments, or for students
using methodologies other than NA.
DEFINITIONS
I take the acquisition of a form of the tar-
get language to be the process which leads to
the ability to understand and produce that form
correctly in a communicative context.4 A "form"
may be monomorphemic (tree), polymor-
phemic (running), or grammatical (the). I will
consider a form to be acquired only when it can
be both understood and produced. This posi-
tion coincides with the "working" definition of
acquisition by second language researchers.5
Consequently, I consider first the development
of listening comprehension skills and then pro-
ceed to speaking skills.
LISTENING COMPREHENSION
The ability to comprehend utterances in the
input can be examined by looking at two com-
ponents: 1) the use of context-dependent strate-
gies to determine meaning of unknown forms
in the input; 2) the association of meaning with
214
these new forms. These component skills inter-
act and depend on each other as the ability to
comprehend grows. Let us first examine the
process which associates meaning with form.
BINDING
Binding is the term I propose to describe the
cognitive and affective mental process of link-
ing a meaning to a form. The concept of bind-
ing is what language teachers refer to when they
insist that a new word ultimately be associated
directly with its meaning and not with a trans-
lation.6 In our native language we bind forms
to their meaning so strongly that most of us
never reflect on the fact that meaning and form
are linked arbitrarily.
The binding of meaning with form clearly
is experiential in the development of our first
language. For example, a child playing in the
yard comes across a flower. Mother provides
input such as: "Isn't that a pretty flower? Do
you like the flower?" (Child pulls off the blos-
som.) "No, don't pick the flower. We are sup-
posed to look at flowers, not pick them." (Child
begins to eat the flower.) "No, don't eat the
flower, smell it. Doesn't the flower smell nice?
It's a pretty flower, isn't it?" Through such ex-
periences, the child uses several senses to de-
velop the concept "flower" and to begin the
binding of this concept to the correct form in
its native language.
The facilitation of binding is a major focus
of activities in a beginning NA class. Many of
the specific NA techniques are explicitly de-
signed to create situations and experiences
which will aid the student in binding meaning
to form. I will review three characteristics of
NA which appear to facilitate the binding pro-
cess.
Acquisition in Stages. Past descriptions of NA
emphasize that students in a NA class are
allowed to proceed through stages of language
acquisition.' Three important stages for be-
ginners are posited: comprehension (prepro-
duction), early speech (one-word responses),
and speech emergence (sentence production).
The existence of a "pre-speech" stage gives the
students an opportunity to concentrate on bind-
ing without the added pressures for speech. In
addition, even when students do start speaking,
one-word responses are encouraged in order to
TracyDavid Terrell
maintain the focus on the comprehension of
input.
ConcreteAssociation. The activities in the first
two stages of NA language acquisition always
include the possibility of making concrete asso-
ciation within a meaningful context. The class
activities include Asher's "Total Physical Re-
sponse" (association with body movement),
input centered on visuals (usually magazine
pictures or other realia), and input centered on
characteristics of the students themselves.8
Speech Techniques.NA instructors draw stu-
dents' attention to key words by means of
various speech techniques: by pronouncing
words slowly, by varying the tone and volume
of the voice, by reentry, by pointing out a
word's referent with each use, and, of course,
by liberal use of gestures and other sorts of body
language. In addition, the focus during all ac-
tivities is on the meaning of the utterances in
the input.
Students in NA classes have reported various
strategies for associating meaning with form.
For example, in a demonstration lesson of
Greek, I introduced the word paputsia (shoes)
pointing to my own and then later to pictures
of shoes.9 The participants later reported a
variety of association techniques. A few looked
at the referent and attempted to link the new
form directly. Others reported using the word
papoos as an association. Still others used the
other languages they knew: Spanish pantuflas
and French pantouffles (slippers). Frequently
students report that at first they recognize some
words only by the initial syllable, or even by
the initial consonant. Sometimes the length of
the word helps. In a TPR activity, some stu-
dents reported distinguishing the command
perpatiste (walk) from trekste (run) simply by
length plus the initial consonant. Thus it ap-
pears that binding takes place in stages for most
students. At first, a new form is recognized as
"something familiar," but the meaning (or more
accurately, meanings) may not be recalled.
Later meaning is slowly recognized. Eventually
the form is recognized and interpreted within
the phonological stream. Binding is complete
when the form evokes the meaning without
delay and the form finally "sounds like what it
means."
The binding of form to meaning is not
equivalent to listening comprehension, but
rather is a building block of it. Listening com-
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
prehension includes other, more complex, pro-
cesses such as the interpretation of the relation-
ships between elements in an utterance. Thus,
in Stage One (Comprehension) the goals of NA
include not only the facilitation of the binding
of key forms in the input to meaning but also
the development of basic comprehension strate-
gies including "contextual guessing." The fol-
lowing is a translation of typical input in one
of my early Greek lessons (students' responses
are in parentheses).'0
Look at this picture. What do we see? A woman?
(Yes.) Yes, that's right, there is a woman in the
picture. What is this? (Students shake heads.) This
is a hat. The woman is wearing a hat. This picture
of the woman who is wearing the hat is for Yvonne.
Ok? Now who has the picture of the woman who
is wearing the hat? (Yvonne.)11
We understood key elements of the input by
matching the parts of the input corresponding
to the concepts represented by the English
words - look,picture, woman, hat, and who- with
the help of contextual cues for meaning. In this
way students are encouraged to develop a sort
of "strategic competence," interpreting the
Greek corresponding to Whohas thepictureof the
woman wearing a hat? by focusing on the target
language forms for who, woman, hat, and the
communicative context.
SPEECH
The production of an utterance in the tar-
get language also involves at least two compo-
nents: the ability to express a particular mean-
ing with a particular form and the ability to
string forms together in appropriate ways. The
former I call access, the latter involves produc-
tion strategies.
Access. The term I use to refer to the produc-
tion of an appropriate form to express a spe-
cific meaning in an utterance is access.12 Be-
ginning students create utterances by access-
ing forms and then stringing them together in
utterances.'3 Access does not follow automati-
cally from binding. Even when a form has been
bound to a meaning and is recognized immedi-
ately in the input, students do not necessarily
produce it automatically and easily.
Facility in access may be controlled by sev-
eral factors. One factor is the strength of the
binding process, itself controlled by several fac-
215
tors (such as salience and frequency) in the
input. If the form to be accessed is not strongly
bound (for whatever reason, perhaps low fre-
quency in the input), then access will be diffi-
cult. Phonological complexity doubtless plays
a role. If the form is long and contains several
sounds radically different from those in the
native language, the word will be difficult to
produce even if it is strongly bound to its mean-
ing. For example, I recognize the meaning of
the word anapsitikd(soft drink) immediately if
it is used by others, but I have difficulty pro-
ducing it, perhaps, because of length and stress
patterns. It is reasonable to assume that facility
in access is also related to frequency of oppor-
tunities to access a specific form in a meaning-
ful context. This assumption is, in part, a re-
statement of the traditional idea that meaning-
ful practice in speaking leads to increased
fluency.
In order to test my hypothesis (that speed of
access is related to opportunities to access a spe-
cific form), we carried out an experiment with
students of German as a foreign language. 14A
group of third-quarter elementary German stu-
dents at the University of California, San
Diego, participated in a TPR (Total Physical
Response) activity in which the instructor
modeled commands such as Husten Sie (cough),
PfeifenSie (whistle), KlatschenSie einmaldie Hiinde
(clap your hands once). In the first session stu-
dents listened only and carried out the instruc-
tions. In the second session, half of the students
gave the commands to the entire group. Thus,
one-half of the group listened only, while the
other half was required to access and vocalize
the forms. Later each student was tested indi-
vidually on his/her ability to access these forms.
As predicted by Krashen's input hypothesis,
access itself was not a problem: all of the stu-
dents in both groups were able to access most
of the forms. However, speed of access was dif-
ferent. The students who actually gave the
commands had consistently shorter access times
than those who had never meaningfully vocal-
ized the commands. The average time required
for recall for the silent group was 2.23 seconds,
while for the speaking group it was 1.68 sec-
onds. The conclusion is that meaningful com-
munication experiences in which students are
given the opportunity to produce forms which
have been (or are in the process of being)
bound, should result in increased fluency.
216
Three methodological characteristics of NA
aid in the development of access skills: 1) acqui-
sition in stages; 2) reduced response activities;
3) expansion of short responses.
Acquisitionin Stages. As with binding, the de-
velopment of good access skills is aided by the
fact that NA students have different sorts of de-
mands put on them in the early stages of lan-
guage acquisition. In the comprehension stage,
access is not demanded at all since all efforts
are directed toward binding a large number of
words. As binding develops, however, the in-
structor begins to provide opportunities within
the input for single word responses from the
students. The responses always consist of a
form which has been bound. There are four im-
portant eliciting techniques: 1) yes-no ques-
tions- Is therea dog in this picture? 2) either-or
questions-Is this a dog or a cat? 3) Wh-ques-
tions - What (Where, When, Who) is this? 4)
Open-ended statements - The dog is in the . . . .
Reduced-ResponseActivities. Certain sorts of
communicative activities require only reduced
responses from the students. Three used fre-
quently in NA are: 1) open dialogs; 2) inter-
views; and 3) information searching.'5
Expansion of Short Responses. NA instructors
expand student responses to provide for com-
prehensible input. For example, in the inter-
change: Is the dog eating? (No.) What'she doing?
(Running.) Yes,he'srunning. Whereis he running?
(Park.) Yes, he's running in a park-the student
was asked to access the items runningand park
but not he's, since presumably the former, but
not the latter, had been bound in previous ac-
tivities. At the same time the exchange allows
for the opportunity to access running,it also pro-
vides an opportunity to enhance the binding
of he's (and perhaps the, in, and a).
Access is not equivalent to speech produc-
tion. Rather, as in the case of binding, it is a
building block of production which ultimately
involves other skills such as the generation of
utterances using the syntax of the target lan-
guage as a frame for the forms which have been
accessed. Unfortunately, we know little about
the sort of speech production strategies used by
students in NA classes.
The binding and access of forms, as a sum-
mary to this point, are seen as basic processes
of both listening and speaking skills - the goals
of an NA class. It follows, then, that for acqui-
sition to take place, two conditions are neces-
TracyDavid Terrell
sary: 1) comprehensible input which results in
binding; 2) opportunities to access these bound
forms to express ideas in meaningful contexts.
The binding of meaning to monomorphemic
forms such as uninflected nouns, verbs, and
adjectives, is relatively simple, both in theory
and in classroom practice. The binding of
meaning to grammatically complex words and
to the grammatical morphemes themselves is
somewhat complicated. Individual students
probably vary somewhat in their binding and
access of words that contain grammatical mor-
phemes. The following remarks are, therefore,
unavoidably speculative and are based again
on personal experiences in NA classes.
BINDING GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES
Morphemes which do not undergo complex
allomorphy and which refer to a relatively
simple semantic concept are most easily
bound. 16EFL and ESL instructors universally
report that the progressive -ing, when referring
to ongoing action, is quickly bound by their stu-
dents. The Spanish preposition de (of), which
indicates possession, is bound quickly and
easily by most English-speaking students. How-
ever, as any ESL teacher affirms, the English
verb marker -s seems particularly resistant to
binding (and access). Perhaps this resistance is
because the verb morpheme -s signals no real
meaning, but, rather, marks a co-occurrence
restriction with singular NP subjects. This sec-
tion describes the binding process of grammati-
cal morphemes in NA classes using as examples
plural markers on nouns and person-number
endings on verbs. It draws on my experience
teaching Spanish to English speakers in the
United States and on that as a student in an
NA Greek class.
Plural. Spanish plural nouns are bound very
quickly by English-speaking students doubtless
because the plural marker -(e)s also signals
plurality in English. After only two or three ex-
amples in the input, mesa/mesas(table/tables),
drbol/drboles(tree/trees), students react to forms
ending in -(e)s as plural.
The plural morpheme on noun modifiers is
not bound as quickly although it is formally
identical to the plural marker on nouns. Ad-
jectives, for example, grande/grandes (big/big-PL)
appear to be processed by attending to the stem
for meaning and ignoring the ending. The
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
obvious explanation is that speakers of English
have nothing in their language which would
cause them to focus on adjectives as a signal
of plurality. Thus the concept "big-PL" is new
and it takes some time to bind the form grandes
to the meaning "b i g-PL," that is, for the word
grandes to "sound" plural. However, with
enough instances of plural adjectives in the estudio,practico,juego, duermo(I + verb meaning)
input, both forms, grande and grandes, are even-
tually bound and interpreted correctly.
Plural forms in Greek are more difficult than
Spanish to bind because several subclasses of
nouns are pluralized with different morphemes.
In my own acquisition of Greek, bound I words
as either singular or plural according to the con- binding of -mos to "first person plural." The
text in which I first heard them. Thus paptitsia
(shoes) was heard as plural and bound as such lar" takes somewhat longer as does the binding
without knowing exactly what part of the word
signaled plurality; this word was never heard
in its singular form. Other words were bound
as singular without a corresponding plural
form: kefdli(head), pdrta(door), taksl'(taxi). Still
others were heard in the input in both forms:
aftokinito (automobile) and aftokinita (auto-
mobiles), yinika (woman) andyindkes (women).
These double forms were also bound as sepa-
rate lexical items. However, as my experience
with Greek input increased, numerous plural
words appeared which ended in -es or -a. Thus
in addition to binding each separate form with
-a or -es, the morphemes themselves were even-
tually bound to the notion of plurality. And
after they were bound, I was able to recognize
them as signaling plurality on new words in the
input. I have not completed the acquisition of
the rule(s) in Greek for plurality, however,
since I have not yet bound enough forms to
have "figured out" the restrictions on the dis- available. For example, NA instructors in pri-
tribution of each allomorph. I also cannot
access and produce all of the plural forms that
I can understand. In addition I have bound a
few other forms which are plural and which do
not use these plural markers: prdovlima/provli'mata attempted to control their input to such a
(problem, problems). Presumably more input
will result in the acquisition of a generalization
concerning these plural forms also.
Person-NumberVerbMorphemes.Beginning NA
Spanish students report that at first they do not
hear or notice person-number affixes on verbs.
Thus hablo (I speak) and habla (he/she/you
speak(s)) are at first simply variants interpreted
as "speak." However, in certain "association" ac-
tivities, forms such as hablo (I speak) and habla
217
(speaks), como (I eat), and come (eats) are fre-
quent in the input and bound relatively soon."7
As the number of forms for a single person
number are bound, say first person singular,
the morpheme itself becomes increasingly
salient. Students who have bound verb forms
such as hablo, como, llego, salgo, pongo, vivo,
subsequently bind the morpheme -o to "I."This
binding is evidenced by the fact that they can
correctly understand new first person singular
forms encountered in the input. Students report
that the binding of -o to "first person singular"
is fairly rapid, and is quickly followed by the
binding of -s to "second person familiar singu-
of -n to "third person plural."
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the binding
of grammatical morphemes is similar to that
of full lexical items. My hypothesis is that in
both cases students begin by binding a com-
plete word to a meaning. Subsequently the
grammatical marker becomes salient as a num-
ber of words with the same marker are bound.
This leads to the possibility of binding the
morpheme itself to the appropriate meaning
and to the ability to understand new forms
which carry the morpheme.
BINDING GRAMMATICAL
NA TECHNIQUES
MORPHEMES:
L2 theory predicts accurately that, for natu-
ral acquirers, grammatical morphemes will be
acquired as expected (in a natural order) pro-
vided that enough comprehensible input is
mary school ESL, immersion, or bilingual pro-
grams do not usually program the inclusion of
specific grammatical morphemes in their
speech; this task would not be easy even if they
degree. The situation is different in NA foreign
language classes for adolescents or adults.
Four potential problems exist: 1) time; 2)
lack of saliency; 3) redundancy; and 4) the pos-
sibility of comprehension without use of gram-
matical morphemes. First, the number of in-
structional hours in a typical elementary col-
lege foreign language course ranges from
seventy-five to 150. Given random input for
these 100 or so hours, it is not clear that most
218
grammatical morphemes would reappear in the
input enough to permit complete binding. Even
worse, the opportunities to access these mor-
phemes in meaningful contexts are quite
limited, especially in classes with more than fif-
teen or so students. Second, grammatical mor-
phemes are often not salient. Typically, gram-
matical morphemes are not stressed and they
are not in salient positions in sentences. They
are also usually redundant, especially when dis-
course and contextual information is taken into
consideration. Finally, students can use global
listening strategies, which avoid attending at
all to grammatical markers, and still under-
stand most of the input.
In order to minimize the negative impact of
these factors, in certain NA activities we try to
make maximal use of important grammatical
morphemes. Examples of these teaching tech-
niques are given below for verbal person-num-
ber morphemes in Spanish and Greek.
Spanish verb forms can give rise to multiple
and complex contrastive patterns; in addition
to person-number forms, one must bind tense,
aspect, and mood morphemes to their mean-
ings. It is not realistic to think that students will
bind (and later skillfully access) the forty or so
forms of each Spanish verb simply from listen-
ing to random input for the one hundred or so
hours of a typical elementary Spanish course.
On the other hand, the memorization of verb
paradigms most certainly guarantees neither
binding nor access.
NA activities use a two-step approach in-
tended to create optimal conditions for the
binding of verb suffixes. The first step consists
of giving input which allows binding meaning
to a number of words containing the same mor-
pheme. Assume the topic of the input in a be-
ginning Spanish class to be "daily activities of
the instructor." The teacher describes his/her
daily routine and the students understand
forms like me levanto(I get up), me baifo(I bathe),
desayuno(I eat breakfast), trabajo(I work), etc.
The fist step is the binding of meaning to the
polymorphemic form, i.e., the students bind
the meaning which includes "I" to the entire
form. This task is relatively simple since first-
person singular forms are concentrated in the
input because of the particular topic chosen
("What I do each day"). As the number of forms
including this same morpheme increases, step
two is carried out: the forms are "analyzed," and
TracyDavid Terrell
the -o itself is bound to "I"(or using grammati-
cal terminology to "first-person singular present
tense"). Once the morpheme -o is bound, it may
be understood (and subsequently produced) on
novel forms in the input.
Another example helps clarify this two-step
process for the binding of a grammatical mor-
pheme. In Greek I bound the following verb
forms to their meaning: mildte(you speak), dxete
(you have), pinete (you drink), and so forth. In
other words, the verb forms I heard and under-
stood in the classroom input were processed
and stored as words rather than as forms con-
sisting of a stem and a grammatical morpheme.
(This had to be the case since additional gram-
matical information was not available to help
me analyze these forms.) However, as an in-
creasing number of these forms with similar
affixes are stored, the binding of -te as a mean-
ingful unit begins. Suppose now that I have
bound a form like fordi (he/she wears). Later
I hear a form fordite(you wear) and recognize
that it refers to "you." Given enough of these
opportunities to interpret new forms with -te,
I will be able to complete the binding of the
morpheme -te to its meaning "second person."
My hypothesis concerning the binding of
meaning to grammatical morphemes is that
complex items are first processed by students
in an NA class as simple words. Then, as the
number of words containing the same gram-
matical morpheme increases, they are able to
attach meaning to the morpheme itself. The
teaching approach of NA is to give opportuni-
ties to hear the same suffix used repeatedly in
a communicative context in which meanings
can be clearly and easily associated with the
stem and the suffix.18
ACCESS OF GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES
Let us now consider forms containing gram-
matical morphemes from the point of view of
their access.'19Apparently at first NA students
assign a general meaning to several forms. For
example, tengo(is) and tiene (3s) are bound to
"have"with no person-number association. This
incomplete binding is possible since, in most
utterances, even in cases of subject deletion in
Spanish, the subject of the sentence is well de-
fined by context. However, when access is re-
quired of forms for which binding is not com-
plete, students produce utterances like *yo tiene
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
tarea(*I has work) as well as the correctyo tengo
tarea. In addition, it appears that these kinds
of agreement errors persist even after the per-
son-number affixes are bound-that is, after
students consistently recognize the meaning of
tengo (I have) and tiene (has). The persistence
of these sorts of morphological errors supports
the notion that access does not automatically
follow from binding.
A complicating factor is the existence of
grammatical agreement. The task of the stu-
dent is not just to recognize and produce singu-
lar and plural verb forms which correspond to
the meaning they want to express, but to access
them attending to co-occurrence restrictions,
i.e., hablan(speak-pl) if the subject is Juan and
Carmen. The final stages of the acquisition of
the rule of person-number agreement in such
cases may be seen as the sorting out of the
access of correct forms at the same time. 20Pre-
sumably as the students process input, the
binding of grammatically complex forms be-
comes increasingly precise. Then with experi-
ence in producing forms in meaningful con-
texts, the access of correct forms is both faster
and more correct.
PROMOTING CORRECT LEXICAL ACCESS
IN NA CLASSES
As in the case of binding, in order to foster
correct access we attempt to create situations
in which certain morphemes are concentrated
in an activity in a single meaning-form rela-
tionship.21 In an interview activity, for ex-
ample, the student might be asked a series of
questions like: Wheredidyou go? Who didyou see?
What didyou do? Didyou eat? Wheredidyou work?
The answer to all of these questions can involve
a verb form in the first-person singular of the
past tense. Students report that communicative
experiences in which they are given opportuni-
ties to access many forms with the same form-
function relationship facilitates the access pro-
cess itself.22
SUMMARY
To this point we have attempted to examine
the acquisition process in NA class activities.
We have looked at listening comprehension and
speech production, and at certain components
of these skills: binding, access, listening strate-
gies, and production strategies. I have sug-
gested that characteristics of NA, especially the
219
notion of the acquisition of speech in natural
stages, and certain instructional techniques
which provide naturally for the concentration
of grammatical morphemes in communicative
activities, are aimed specifically at developing
binding and access-i.e., the basic building
blocks of acquisition.
L2 THEORY: THE INSTRUCTOR'S VIEW
Krashen's L2 acquisition theory is based pri-
marily on research which looks at language ac-
quisition in natural environments (accom-
panied or not by classroom instruction). How-
ever, certain problematic areas exist in L2 ac-
quisition theory when applied to classroom in-
struction- especially to foreign language in-
struction. I will examine four of them and in
each case show how Krashen's acquisition
framework, which includes the concepts of
binding and access as proposed here, resolves
these problems.
Vocabulary.L2 researchers often talk about
"the acquisition of a second language," but "ac-
quisition" in L2 research and theory has been
applied mostly to morphology, syntax, and
sometimes phonology. Indeed, most of the re-
search Krashen cites to support L2 theory con-
sists of the studies which focus on the acquisi-
tion of particular morphemes such as English
-ing, verbal -s, plural -s, the copula, and so
forth. Some syntactic studies of areas such as
sentence negation and relative clause formation
do exist.23 Increasing attention is currently
being paid to the acquisition of discourse skills.
On the other hand almost no work has been
done on the acquisition of simple monomor-
phemic words. This lack of focus on the acqui-
sition of simple vocabulary items is somewhat
peculiar from the point of view of the instruc-
tor of an elementary L2 class. And, of course,
from the point of view of the beginning students
trying to communicate with a native speaker
of the target language, the most important com-
ponent of that language is its lexicon. In the
discussion to this point, I have hypothesized
that the concepts of binding and access, hence
acquisition, are applicable both to monomor-
phemic lexical items and to grammatical mor-
phemes. Indeed, most of the activities in the
first two stages in an NA class are designed spe-
cifically to focus on the binding and access of
key nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Speech in the NA Class. L2 researchers nor-
220
mally measure acquisition by some criterion of
production. We say, for example, that speakers
have acquired the -ing morpheme when they
produce it in ordinary speech at or above, say,
a ninety percent accuracy level in obligatory
occasions.24 Krashen's Input Hypothesis claims
that acquisition results from understanding
messages. Theoretically, one could make the
claim that acquisition takes place without any
speech production. Such a claim would have
no practical implications since the principal
source of comprehensible input must be oral
interaction with speakers of the target lan-
guage. Native speakers are not usually known
to pursue conversation with those who do not
or cannot respond. Within the binding-access
framework proposed here, acquisition is de-
fined as both the ability to comprehend and to
produce meaningful utterances in the target
language. By definition then, acquisition is com-
plete only when the student can both compre-
hend and produce the target language. It fol-
lows that comprehensible input is the primary
source for acquisition, since comprehensible
input provides both the opportunities and the
data for the binding process and the develop-
ment of listening comprehension strategies.
However, although acquisition begins with
comprehensible input, students must have
opportunities to access and produce linguistic
elements which have been bound. Within the
binding-access framework, this amounts to the
claim that the student must have real two-way
conversational experiences for complete acqui-
sition to take place.25
Since the focus of L2 theory and of the first
two stages of NA is on comprehensible input,
teachers frequently ask about the role of speech
in acquisition. Within the binding-access
framework this question becomes more precise:
what role does access play in binding? We
assume that increased opportunities for access-
ing bound forms will, of course, lead to more
skill in access. However, a different question
remains: does forcing the student to access
words which have not yet been bound, espe-
cially words containing grammatical suffixes,
help to bind those elements? It should be noted
that this position is precisely that of the "cog-
nitive" approach in which language lessons are
organized in the following way: 1) explain; 2)
practice; and 3) apply. And, in fact, most texts
assume that binding is aided by access since
TracyDavid Terrell
almost all exercises are designed to force the
students to produce forms they have had little
or no opportunity to bind. However, the effect
of forced production of unbound forms on the
binding process itself remains an open ques-
tion. Certainly non-meaningful production
would not have any effect on binding. On the
other hand, the production of unbound items
in a meaningful context by one student might
serve as comprehensible input to other students
and aid the latter in the binding process. How-
ever, it is not clear that the mechanical produc-
tion of unbound forms, the goal of most gram-
matical exercises, has more than a minimal
effect on binding for the student who produces
them.
Because of our skepticism regarding the
value of production of unbound forms, NA ac-
tivities are designed to give the students oppor-
tunities to bind forms before being asked to
access and produce them. In any natural inter-
change, however, students inevitably try to ex-
ceed their range of competence and attempt to
access and produce words not yet bound. This
attempt is, in part, necessary in order to de-
velop strategic competence. Thus some access
of unbound forms will be found in any NA class
activity. However, if one adheres to the prin-
ciple of "stages"of acquisition described above,
most language the students will be asked to pro-
duce will have been bound and the occasional
access of unbound forms probably does no
harm. In any case comprehensible input, not
the production of unbound forms, is the prin-
cipal vehicle for binding. And indeed forced
production of forms which have not yet been
bound results in numerous errors and perhaps
is a contributing factor to the fossilization of
inaccurate forms. The remedy for fossilization
prescribed by most proponents of "cognitive"
approaches is error correction. Unfortunately,
whatever the benefits of error correction dur-
ing mechanical drills, direct and "interruptive"
error correction of grammatical details during
meaningful communication clearly disrupts the
acquisition process.
Conscious and Subconscious Knowledge. In
Krashen's L2 theory (and in the version of the
NA presented in Krashen and Terrell's The
Natural Approach, note 1 below) acquisition is
a subconscious process and occurs only when
input is comprehended within a communica-
tive context. Learning is a conscious process.
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
While merely terms, conscious and subcon-
scious may be useful for explaining second-lan-
guage acquisition in a natural environment;
they are definitely problematic for the class-
room L2 instructor.26 Basing a definition of ac-
quisition on this contrast has caused many in-
structors to reject L2 theory on the basis that
the terms "conscious" and "subconscious" are
difficult, if not impossible, to work with. Stu-
dents normally pay conscious attention to lan-
guage during classroom instruction. If the in-
structor emphasizes acquisition, L2 acquisition
theory has it that one is forced to presume much
of the instruction will be directed toward some-
thing happening subconsciously in the minds
of the students; that is not a comfortable stance
for most instructors. In addition, many teachers
resist the idea that students should not be ex-
plicitly encouraged to pay attention to the pro-
duction of "correct"target language. L2 theory
recommends focus only on the message, not on
grammar, but while this is presumably the
norm in natural acquisition contexts, it is often
difficult to achieve in the foreign language class-
room.
Higgs asserts that the problem stems from
a failure to distinguish the process of acquisi-
tion from its product.27 Within the binding-
access framework proposed here this problem
is resolved: the product, i.e., acquired lan-
guage, is available for subconscious automatic
production. However, this availability does not
imply that the process of acquisition by adults
in a classroom must take place entirely on a
subconscious level. Students in NA classes
claim that indeed much of the acquisition pro-
cess appears to take place on a conscious level.
To see the merit of this claim, let us return to
the concepts of binding and access. I will again
use examples first of monomorphemic words
and then grammatical morphemes.
In the previous discussion I imply that items
of major lexical categories may be bound con-
sciously; that is, many students may attend
consciously to the association of target language
forms with their meanings. I even suggest vari-
ous conscious strategies that students use for
the binding process. This conscious binding
certainly applies to the core denotative mean-
ing of an item. If, in a classroom during an EFL
lesson, I point to a table and say to a student
This is a table, most language students make a
conscious effort to bind the form they hear with
221
the concept "table." This is also true for adults
in natural acquisition situations. One evening
in a Greek taverna, I asked the person sitting
next to me what kind of work he did. The
answer, stratiotis, meant nothing to me. How-
ever, explanation and gestures led me to the
concept (soldier) and even to the place of work
(Santorini). My efforts to link stratiotisand con-
cept "soldier" were indeed quite conscious and
deliberate.
As the students' competence advances, bind-
ing becomes more precise; other information
about the word, its range, its connotations, is
bound either consciously or subconsciously. For
example, some students consciously note that
Spanish esquinarefers only to an exterior corner
such as on a street, while rincdnrefers only to
an interior one such as the corner of a room.
Other students bind this distinction subcon-
sciously, recognize the meaning, and access the
two forms correctly without thinking explicitly
of the distinction.
Conscious attention also plays a role in NA
activities designed for the binding of gram-
matical morphemes. For example, the Spanish
plural marker -(e)s is used by English-speaking
students for interpreting utterances, and this
knowledge is usually available for conscious in-
trospection. What varies among adults is the
level of grammatical sophistication (metalan-
guage) available to discuss their knowledge.
My claim is that in an NA class various levels
of conscious attention may be present during
the binding process itself. Indeed, one could de-
fine binding as a mixture of conscious and/or
subconscious attempts at connecting a form
with meaning by attending both to the mean-
ing and context of the utterance in which the
form is heard. Keep in mind, however, that
conscious attention to forms does not imply any
particular level of grammatical sophistication.
Such conscious attention is also not a prerequi-
site for the binding of grammatical mor-
phemes.28 My rejection of the conscious/sub-
conscious distinction does not support the so-
called "communication drills" in which students
are forced to attend to creative communication
and monitor grammatical forms at the same
time.
What about access and the conscious/sub-
conscious distinction? Within a binding-access
framework we may view the production of
utterances as the accessing and arrangement of
222
forms using (morpho-)syntactic rules. Adult
learners in an NA class report that access fre-
quently, but not always, involves conscious
mental "searching" for a form to express a par-
ticular meaning. This claim seems especially
to hold true with beginning students. And, if
access of a particular item has not occurred
often, that item will often be "hard" to access.
In early speech, many students report that most
access and production of single word responses
is done consciously. Such was my case in all
encounters with native speakers in Greece: only
after multiple opportunities to access a given
word in a communicative context was I able
to do so without conscious attention. Of course,
to say that early access may be either conscious
or subconscious does not imply that students
are focussed only on grammar, but rather that
they are focussed on accessing a form to express
a desired meaning. If the access is for forms
which have been bound, the process is easier.
The more experience accessing a particular
form in communicative contexts, the more
fluent the speech, and the more subconscious
the accessing of particular forms becomes.
Monitoring in NA. Using the binding-access
we may now redefine Monitoring without rely-
ing on the conscious-subconscious distinction.
Krashen defines monitoring as the use of
"learned" knowledge to edit our production.
Presumably, then, the use of any knowledge
which had been obtained with the aid of con-
scious attention would be termed monitoring.
Within the context of the classroom, this defi-
nition of monitor use is clearly too broad. Using
the binding-access framework it is not neces-
sary to use the conscious/subconscious distinc-
tion and we may define monitoring as the
access of forms learned (studied, memorized),
but not yet bound. Thus, monitoringis the use
of a form which one knows to be correctvia studyand
exercises, but which has not yet been "experienced"
enoughto "soundlike"what it means. For example,
a student of Spanish may answer the question,
cQudpasd anoche?(What happened last night?)
by beginning with mis amigos (my friends) . . .
and they pausing, trying to generate the third-
person plural form of the past tense of venir
(come). Although various forms of venir may
have been bound, venir (to come), vengo (I
come), and viene (comes), and perhaps a few
others of the forty or so possible forms, the
third-person plural past vinieronmay have not
TracyDavid Terrell
been present in the input or for whatever rea-
son it may not have been salient enough to have
been bound. After some thought, the incorrect
*venieronmay be created if the student remem-
bers the endings which have been memorized,
or the correct vinieron,if he/she also remembers
to make the correct stem vowel change in this
form. Finally the student produces Mis amigos
vinierona visitarme(My friends came to visit me).
Thus the student falls back on the rules which
he/she has learned and creates the form. The
result is a correct utterance, but vinieron still
does not "sound" like "they came"; rather, the
student knows consciously that this form means
"they came" to a native speaker of Spanish.
One of the reasons monitoring is so difficult
is that the speaker has no way to judge output
except consciously by rule. Since the forms
have not yet been bound, they do not neces-
sarily "feel"correct. The view of monitoring as
the accessing of unbound forms also predicts
that the students may generate forms they
would not necessarily even understand in a
communicative context. This happened fre-
quently to me in Greece. I would carefully
memorize a word from my "Greek for tourists"
book and even produce it successfully on occa-
sion. However, when the same word was used
later by natives, I often would not recognize it.
Monitoring defined without appealing to the
conscious/subconscious distinction is now
clearly separate from the notion of "attending"
to speech. I have assumed that binding occurs
when the students attendto the elements of the
input, i.e., that they actively try to associate
meaning and form and subsequently, in their
production, try to make the elements in their
output match as closely as possible the input.
My claim is that whether this "attention" is pri-
marily conscious and/or subconscious is essen-
tially irrelevant.29 As long as meaning and form
are associated experientially, acquisition is tak-
ing place.
In general we would prefer that our students
use their acquired system while speaking. They
would thus comprehend enough bound forms
in the utterance to follow the message; in their
speech they would access forms they bound
through input. However, in certain cases, a
grammatical morpheme may be particularly re-
sistant to binding (English verbal -s, for ex-
ample) or the system itself may consist of so
many forms that it is difficult to hear each often
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
enough to bind the meaning of a particular one.
In these instances, the students who wish to ex-
press themselves using forms not yet completely
bound have the choice of either making errors
or monitoring to improve correctness. The verb
affix system of Romance languages is notori-
ously difficult to bind since thirty to fifty forms
exist for each verb. Each of several thousand
common verb forms must be repeatedly heard
in a meaningful context to be completely
bound. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to expect
that complete binding of these forms takes sev-
eral years of high quality input. In these cases,
it is not unreasonable to expect students to
monitor their speech to improve grammatical
accuracy. Indeed, in The NaturalApproach(note
1 below), we suggest that the goal of an NA
class is to produce "optimal"monitors, low-level
monitoring which improves accuracy but does
not interfere with communication.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEARNING AND
IN THE CLASSROOM
ACQUISITION
Various researchers have discussed the rela-
tionship between acquisition and learning.30
Many, including Brown and Bialystok, for ex-
ample, propose that learning and acquisition
are the ends of a single continuum. Still others
such as Sharwood-Smith hypothesize that
learning aids acquisition.31 Krashen rejects the
proposition that learning becomes acquisition,
while noting the possibility that something
learned may later be acquired.32
I have no evidence to clarify claims and
counterclaims for natural second language ac-
quisition. However, in the context of NA, the
question is easy to answer: learning in some
cases aids acquisition and, in others, impedes
it. Let us look at examples of each.
Most students in an NA class agree that
some learning via mechanical drills aids the ac-
quisition process. Learning of grammatical
forms and new words might aid acquisition in
two ways. First, learning focusses attention on
a new element so that, when it appears in the
input, it might be recognized and, therefore,
salient. For example, it appears to be helpful
to students of Spanish and French to discuss
explicitly the concept of subject-verb agree-
ment. Such a discussion might be profitably fol-
lowed up by an exercise to verify comprehen-
sion of the concept. The explanation and exer-
cise are aimed at learning. Learning is not ac-
223
quisition, and it does not becomeacquisition
without the necessary comprehensible input.
However, just the fact that the students under-
stand that verb forms may vary according to
their subjects may speed up binding and access
of these forms during subsequent acquisition
activities. The claim then is not that learning
becomes acquisition, since binding is still con-
ditional based on comprehensible input, but
rather that such knowledge may aid in mak-
ing the forms to be bound and accessed more
salient in the input itself.
Second, explicit study and learning of new
forms could aid in the inference of global mean-
ing from utterances containing a large number
of unbound elements. This sort of learned
knowledge would seem to aid the acquisition
process in a general way even if it does not
necessarily affect the particular items being
studied. Suppose, for example, I learn that
Greek yethira is equivalent to bridge. I may
repeat the word aloud several times or con-
sciously try to associate something with it to
help retention. If asked for the Greek equiva-
lent for bridge,I can produceyethira in the same
way that tourists often memorize and produce
phrases such as How muchdoesit cost?However,
yethira is not yet bound to the concept repre-
sented by English bridge, I simply "know" (ab-
stractly, theoretically) that it refers to bridge.To
bind the concept to the Greek word I still need
to hear yethira used in a meaningful context.
Suppose the instructor now tells a story in
whichyethira is used several times. Since I have
previously learned the meaning of yethira, the
word is salient for me and I will doubtless con-
sciously recognize it when said. And, if I
visualize a bridge in the context of a story, it
is likely that I will be able to bind the meaning
to the word: the formyethira will begin to "sound
like" its meaning.
This sort of "prelearning" of vocabulary may
indeed aid acquisition, but it is not very effi-
cient. It is notoriously difficult to bind mean-
ing to form when both are associated arbitrarily
in a "vocabulary list" or a mechanical drill. Per-
haps such learning affects only short-term
memory. On the other hand, it is relatively
simple to bind meaning to form when both are
used in communicative contexts. As I noted
above, the only possible advantage to prelearn-
ing is that it may in some cases speed up the
binding process by making the new forms
224
salient in the input. In NA we do not depend
much on prelearning; we prefer rather to intro-
duce all new items in a communicative context
first. However, individual learning styles vary
greatly and some students report "reading
ahead" in the text in order to preview new
material.
Conscious review of new words and gram-
matical forms heard only a few times in the
input may also speed up the binding process.
In one class period, my Greek instructor
showed a picture of a bay with a bridge at one
end. New words introduced in the input in-
cluded the Greek equivalents of bridge, bay,
ships, clouds, water, buildings, and highway. Each
of these words was used several times, and he
asked questions like: Is therea bridgein this pic-
ture? Whereare the ships? How many ships do you
see? What colorare the clouds?Naturally the bind-
ing of each new word was not completed in a
single class activity. The next day I reviewed
the new words introduced in the previous class
period, pronouncing each while trying to
visualize its referent. The instructor had given
good comprehensible input at the correct level.
I engaged in conscious study consisting of a
review of the new words outside of class. I can-
not, of course, prove that the review helped
speed up binding. However, I am convinced
that at least for me, consciousstudy during my
review of these words made them more salient;
and during the following classes, when these
words were again used in a meaningful con-
text, my recognition of their meaning was quick
and easy.
One could argue correctly that the learning
practice was unnecessary - with enough input
the words would have been acquired in any
case. While this assertion is probably true (and
is most likely the normal way second-language
acquirers in natural situations gain new
vocabulary), sufficient class time does not exist
for the necessary amount of reentry of each new
word; materials which could supply compre-
hensible input outside of class are not readily
available. Learning in the form of moderate
amounts of (pre- and) post-study may speed up
the binding of lexical items in situations in
which there would not be enough time or op-
portunity for the necessary reentry in com-
prehensible input.33
The (pre- and) post-study of grammatical
morphemes (and their associated rules of dis-
TracyDavid Terrell
tribution and co-occurrence) may also speed up
their acquisition. In Spanish and French the
nonstressed natural and preverbal placement
of the clitic pronouns make their acquisition
quite problematic; most students report that,
at first, they do not even hear them and simply
infer their presence by context. It does not seem
unreasonable that an explanation of their form
and placement followed by short exercises to
verify comprehension of the explanation would
be helpful in making these forms more salient
and thereby more understandable in the input.
However, the study of grammar is more
problematic than is the learning of simple vo-
cabulary. In order for the study of grammar
to be effective, one would want to study a par-
ticular morpheme at the beginning of the bind-
ing process. Unfortunately, it is not always
clear exactly when binding begins. If grammar
is studied too soon, this knowledge may indeed
interfere with comprehension of utterances and
thereby retard the binding process.
During the first hour of my Greek instruc-
tion, the instructor used visuals, made state-
ments about the content of pictures, and then
asked yes/no questions to verify comprehen-
sion. To answer I simply had to shake my head
yes or no. I recall a picture of a woman cross-
ing a street. The instructor stressed the words
yineka (woman), forema (dress), and ble (blue) in
the input as the key lexical items to be bound
in order to comprehend the input. The ques-
tions to verify comprehension were relatively
simple, my task mostly being to recognize these
three phonological shapes among the "noise":
Is this a woman? Is this a dress?Is the dress blue?
One must keep in mind I did not (nor could
I) attend to the forms corresponding to English
is, this, or the, nor even wearing, have, and pic-
ture. But I was successful in comprehending the
questions and was able to respond correctly to
them.
In this and later input I also began to hear
occasionally the word ine. I asked what it
meant. The instructor replied that it is the
third-person singular of the verb to be. One
would assume that such knowledge would help
bind since the utterances would contain one less
unknown element. Unfortunately, at that time
this new knowledge caused me a great deal of
trouble because I would subsequently focus on
ine and often miss another more important item
in the input. Thus in a question like Is the dress
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
that this woman is wearing blue?I would focus on
ine and miss fdrema (dress) and was unable to
answer the question. The problem was that,
initially, I was unable to attend to much more
than one form per utterance. This stage did not
last long, of course, and within a few class hours
I was able to process two or three words per
utterance and ine was bound in due time to
"copula" as indeed was afto to "demonstrative."
Although knowledge of target language
grammar may generally aid in the acquisition
process, the danger for instructors is to stress
too much grammar too soon. A common prac-
tice in French, Spanish, and German classes
is to introduce the forms of the definite and in-
definite articles within the first hour of instruc-
tion. This practice is a mistake. The recogni-
tion of articles does nothing to aid comprehen-
sion; and the probability of binding meaning
to the various articles and sorting out their
proper distribution so soon is very low. Spe-
cific focus on verb affixes also usually happens
too soon; knowledge of verb paradigms plays
little or no role in beginners' comprehension -
which in early stages depends mostly on the
recognition of the verb stems.34
NOTES
1Stephen D. Krashen and Tracy D. Terrell, The Natural
Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom (Oxford:
Pergamon; Hayward, CA: Alemany, 1983). See also Tracy
D. Terrell, "A Natural Approach to the Acquisition and
Learning of a Language," Modern Language Journal, 61
(1977), pp. 325-36; "The Natural Approach to Language
Teaching: An Update," Modern LanguageJournal, 66 (1982),
pp. 121-32; Stephen D. Krashen, Tracy D. Terrell,
Madeline Ehrman & Martha Herzog, "A Theoretical Basis
for Teaching the Receptive Skills," ForeignLanguageAnnals,
17 (1984), pp. 261-75; Tracy D. Terrell, "The Natural Ap-
proach in Bilingual Education," Schooling and Language
Minority Students: A TheoreticalFramework (California State
Department of Education, Los Angeles: Evaluation, Dis-
semination and Assessment Center, California State Uni-
versity, Los Angeles, 1982).
2Stephen D. Krashen, Second Language Acquisition and
Second Language Learning (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981), and
Principles and Practice in SecondLanguageAcquisition (Oxford:
Pergamon, 1982).
3Certain other conditions are not directly relevant to this
discussion: the acquirer must be focussed on the message,
the input must be at a certain level (i + 1), and the acquirer
must have a low "affective filter." See Krashen (note 2 above)
for details.
225
CONCLUSION
Certain problems in the application of
Krashen'sL2 theory to foreign-languageclass-
room teaching led me to re-examine the func-
tion of acquisition and learning for language
students. In this paper I redefine the terms "ac-
quisition"and "learning"for the classroomcon-
text in what I call the binding/accessframework
for acquisition. The redefinition does not
change the essence of Krashen's L2 theory.
However, the new definitionshave advantages
for the language instructor: 1) they treat both
lexical and grammatical acquisition; 2) they
clarifythe relationshipbetween comprehension
and speech in the acquisition process; and 3)
they differentiatebetween acquiredand learned
knowledge without using a conscious-subcon-
scious distinction. Within this framework, ac-
quisition as a process is seen as a mixture of
conscious and subconscious attempts at bind-
ing form and meaning and then accessingthose
forms for a communicative purpose. Learning
exercises may in some cases aid the acquisition
process for many students.35
4Leonard Newmark (personal communication) points out
correctly that my focus is quite restrictive: acquisition does
not just occur form by form; rather, acquirers tend to
"chunk," to acquire pieces of routines, patterns, and under-
standing and to produce them through various "approxi-
mative" stages. I have chosen to restrict my attention to
the acquisition of forms and will not discuss the acquisition
of syntax (word order, transformations, etc.) here.
5To my knowledge all scholars in second language acqui-
sition use this definition. Comprehension is assumed but
not usually measured.
6My use of binding is related to the Sausurrean concepts
of signification and unrelated to Chomsky's use of the term
in syntactic theory. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, Lec-
tures on Governmentannd Binding (Foris: Dorecht, 1981).
7See notes 1 and 2 above.
sSee James J. Asher, Learning Another Language through
Actions: The Complete Teacher'sGuide (Los Gatos, CA: Sky
Oaks, 1977), and Krashen & Terrell (note 1 above), pp.
75-84.
9I use my own broad phonetic transcription for Greek.
10The NA Greek class was taught by Evris Tsakirides.
"1Superficially these input sequences appear to be no
more than modified audiolingual drills or grammatical exer-
cises. Transcribed speech always seems somewhat strange.
In the case of early input sequences in NA, the repetition
which seems perfectly natural in context "looks funny" when
written down. However, when used with interesting visuals,
with good intonation patterns and accompanying body lan-
226
guage, these simple input sequences are normally quite
interesting for the students. However, such sequences are
not, and are not meant to be, representative of real com-
munication between native speakers of the target language.
Herein lies a difference between the communicative ap-
proach and NA. In the former, all input texts should be
representative of natural, communicative events, hence the
emphasis on authentic texts. In NA, on the other hand,
we aim at input which is a reduced code (teacher talk)
parallel to the interaction between a parent and small child
(motherese) or between a native and a nonnative speaker
(foreigner-talk) both of which correspond to Krashen's i + 1.
The Greek sequence, while inauthentic as a text between
adult speakers, would be perfectly natural between a mother
and daughter looking at a picture book.
121have defined access in this way so that it will be related
directly to acquisition. The term "access"could be used more
broadly than I have defined it here. Other sorts of access
exist. For example, in audiolingual drills students are forced
to access forms they are learning; in translation exercises
students are forced to access words they have not yet
studied. Presumably these mental searches would aid learn-
ing more than acquisition.
13For the most part, the syntax of beginning students
appears to be that of their native language. However, there
may be simple pragmatic modes in which, for all practical
purposes, there is no syntax but rather a stringing together
of ideas in the order they are thought of. For some data
and discussion, see John Schumann, "Utterance Structure
in Basilang Speech," Pidgen and CreoleLanguages. Essays in
Memory ofJohn E. Reinecke, ed. Glenn Gilbert (Ann Arbor:
Karoma, 1983).
'4Leonora Hoskins, "The Effects of Vocalization on
Recall," unpublished paper read in a graduate seminar at
the University of California, San Diego, spring 1983.
'5See Krashen & Terrell (note 1 above), chapter 4.
16E. V. Clark & R. A. Berman, "Structure and Use in
the Acquisition of Word Formation," Language, 60 (1984),
pp. 542-90, refer to these properties as "semantic trans-
parency" and "formal simplicity." They add two other gen-
eral principles for the mastery of a word formation reper-
toire: "productivity" and "conventionality."
"'These activities are described in Tracy D. Terrell,
Magdalena Andrade, Jeanne Egasse & E. Miguel Mufioz,
Dos Mundos.:Instructor'sEdition (New York: Random House,
1986).
'8See also my essay "A Natural Approach to the Teaching
of Verb Forms and Functions in Spanish," ForeignLanguage
Annals, 13 (1980), pp. 129-36.
191view the production of grammatically complex forms
(in this case stem + affix) in the following way. Complex
forms are stored as complete words in the lexicon, i.e.,
hablamos(we speak) is stored and accessed as a single unit.
However, acquirers also formulate (and store) generaliza-
tions about grammatically complex words. With these
generalizations they are able to understand and generate
forms not previously encountered in the input. This view
is based on Joan L. Bybee & D. I. Slobin, "Rules and
Schemas in the Development and Use of the English Past,"
Language, 60 (1982), Ip. 265-89. However, Bybee & Slobin
posit this analysis only for irregular past tense forms in
TracyDavid Terrell
English. They state explicitly (their note 10) "it is possible
that some regular past tense forms, particularly of high fre-
quency verbs, are also stored in the lexicon, but we have
found no evidence in the current research to support this
possibility" (p. 268).
201 view agreement rules in terms of lexical access, not
morpheme addition. In this view los automdvilesnuevos (the
new cars) is produced by accessing three plural forms los,
automdviles, and nuevos, not by accessing stems and then
adding suffixes while generating an utterance. Lexical access
implies that all forms in a paradigm are stored lexically and
accessed as such. In addition, a speaker also stores rules
and can use them to generate novel forms, either those
which have never occurred in the input or those which have
occurred so infrequently that they have not yet been stored
lexically (see also note 19 above). In this view, number
agreement is a co-occurrence restriction on access of plural
forms.
21I should, in all fairness, point out that one is not forced
to view the acquisition of grammatical morphemes by for-
eign language students as an important goal. In that case,
no reason would exist to try to control the input. Certainly,
traditional syllabi, texts, materials, and even methodolo-
gies viewed the learning of grammar as the principal (and
often, only) goal in a foreign language course.
220ne might object that L2 theory as currently formu-
lated is incompatible with the idea that instructor manipula-
tion of input can speed up the acquisition of a particular
morpheme since these are presumably acquired in a
"natural" order. However, there are reasons to reject such
a position. Factors must exist which operate in the acqui-
sition process to cause a natural order of acquisition. Al-
though we do not know exactly what these factors are, we
can hypothesize that they might include such things as:
semantic transparency, allomorphy, usefulness, redun-
dancy, salience, frequency, and so forth. These factors (or
others) must interact in rather complex ways to produce
the natural order found in so many studies. If these are
the factors that control the natural order, then it follows
that acquisition might be speeded up, or the order even
changed if we could manipulate some of the controlling
factors. Although such control of input is difficult, it cer-
tainly is not impossible in a foreign language context: the
language instructor often completely controls the input in
the target language. The factors most "controllable" are fre-
quency, salience, and usefulness. By radical control of the
input and the topics of the communicative interactions, the
instructor could conceivably speed up at least the acquisi-
tion of certain morphemes and in some cases even change
their natural order of acquisition. The issue is somewhat
uninteresting for language instructors since, in most cases,
we do not know what the natural order is anyway and there-
fore have no way of measuring the effect of the strategies
proposed here.
23Heidi Dulay, Marina Burt & Stephen Krashen, Lan-
guage Two (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).
24Roger Brown, A First Language (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1973).
25Several colleagues have pointed out that this view of
acquisition implies that even the first (dominant) language
is never completely acquired. For example, there exist many
Acquisition in the Natural Approach
words we understand but which we do not (or even could
not) produce easily. Within the binding/access framework,
these forms would be considered to be only partially ac-
quired, i.e., bound, but not accessed. To take another
example, second generation "natives" who can understand,
but not produce their "mother" tongue, must be said to have
only partially acquired that language.
26H. Douglas Brown, "The Consensus: Another View,"
Foreign Language Annals, 17 (1984), pp. 177-80, notes:
"Psychologists are still pursuing definitions of conscious-
ness and have not reached any sort of explanatory adequacy
in that pursuit - at least none that psychologists can agree
on." However, my proposal in this paper to define acqui-
sition and learning without appealing to a "conscious-sub-
conscious" dichotomy does not lead in the direction Brown
proposes, namely that acquisition and learning are the final
points of a single continuum.
27Theodore V. Higgs (San Diego State Univ.), personal
communication.
28My preliminary work with native speakers of English
who have acquired Spanish in the Dominican Republic
without formal instruction or study indicates that conscious
binding strategies are used far less by "natural" acquirers
than by students in a classroom. A typical comment was
"I didn't really make a conscious effort to remember a new
word since I knew that I would hear it many times a day
and it would just sink in by itself."
29The lack of careful attention to the input may be the
principal cause of fossilization among adult L2 acquirers.
In L1 acquisition, children imitate, first, adults and, later,
their peers. This "imitation" also applies to language: chil-
dren want to "sound like" everyone else around them. I
believe that, precisely because of this strong drive toward
imitation, children attend to details in the input which are
not strictly necessary for the communication of informa-
tion. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from children's
awareness of the difference between the input and their pro-
duction. For example, my four-year-old niece became very
upset when, using her pronunciation, I asked about her
trip on the "erplane." She was aware of the difference
between her pronunciation and the pronunciation in the
input and she correctly interpreted that I was making fun
of her inability to imitate a model. Adults, in most cases,
do not have the same strong drive to assimilate completely
and "be like" natives of L2. I do not mean to imply that
such an integrative motivation is necessary for perfect L2
acquisition, but rather that such motivation produces a
greater "attention" to the input and that this attention (not
the motivation per se) results in accurate binding and later
facility in access. In "Communicative Competence: Some
Rules of Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible Out-
put in its Development" (presented at the University of
Southern California, 1983), Merrill Swain makes a similar
proposal in her attempt to explain why Canadian French
immersion students lag behind their native French coun-
terparts despite many years of presumably good compre-
hensible input. She says: "the claim, then, is that produc-
ing the target language may be the trigger that forces the
learner to pay attention to the means of expression needed
in order to successfully convey his or her own intended
meaning."
227
30Michael Long, "Does Second Language Instruction
Make a Difference? A Review of Research," TESOL Quar-
terly, 17 (1983), pp. 359-82, examines the effect of formal
second language instruction on language proficiency and
concludes that we have "considerable evidence to indicate
that SL instruction does make a difference." He shows that
the effect of instruction holds: 1) for children as well as
adults; 2) for intermediate and advanced students, not just
beginners; 3) on integrative as well as discrete-point tests;
and 4) in acquisition-rich as well as acquisition-poor envi-
ronments. Long claims (p. 374): "Instruction is supposed
to result in learning, defined by Krashen as conscious
knowledge of rules of SL." His study leads him to suggest
a redefining of the construct learning, which "currently
seems too narrow." Although, in principle, I agree with
Long's conclusions, my approach in this paper has been
the opposite, i.e., a broadening of the concept of acquisi-
tion and a narrowing of what is considered to be learning
(although perhaps a broadening of its role in acquisition).
The problem is Krashen's characterization of acquisition
as a subconscious process. If acquisition, as defined in the
binding-access framework, can include conscious attention
to language and language forms, then much of what goes
on in formal instruction can be thought of as an aid to acqui-
sition directly. Therefore, I do not assume that formal lan-
guage classes must necessarily equate with learning
(although this is still too often the case in foreign language
classes).
31See H. Douglas Brown (note 26 above); M. Sharwood-
Smith, "Consciousness-Raising and the Second Language
Learner," Applied Linguistics, 11 (1981), pp. 159-68.
32See Krashen, 1982 (note 2 above). I do not support
in either case the position that learning "becomes" acquisi-
tion. Learning may indeed aid in binding and in access,
but the conditions posited for acquisition by Krashen's L2
theory (see note 2 above) still hold even after the form has
been learned, i.e., it must be used in comprehensible input
in a communicative context such that binding can take place
and the student must have ample opportunities to access
and produce the form to communicate messages.
330n the other hand, time spent on the study of vocabu-
lary would clearly have been better spent listening to addi-
tional comprehensible input. For example, recorded texts
at my level of competence containing the words used in
class would have been much more helpful than simple rote
review and study. Thus, even though I claim that learning
can aid acquisition, I do not assume that learning is the
most desirable way to enhance acquisition for all students
in all contexts.
34Barry Taylor, "Teaching ESL: Incorporating a Com-
municative, Student-Centered Component," TESOL Quar-
terly, 17 (1983), pp. 69-88, offers other reasons for explicit
grammar instruction: 1) to supplement communicative
experiences; 2) to make up for the lack of input; 3) to use
the target language in the teaching of grammar; and 4) to
satisfy a perceived need of the students.
35I am grateful for comments and suggestions which were
made on early drafts of this paper by Trisha Dvorak, James
Lee, Bill VanPatten, Theodore Higgs, Stephen Krashen,
Robin Scarcella, Roni LeBauer, Betty Leeman, Irene
Daniels, Robert Maple, and Leonard Newmark.