u1t1

Mason, Timothy. (1999). A critical summary of Krashen’s

five hypotheses. In Timothy Mason’s site.
Retrieved December 15, 2010 from
http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangT
each/Licence/FLTeach/Thunk1.htm

A CRITICAL SUMMARY OF KRASHEN'S FIVE HYPOTHESES

Intro & Thunk 1

The present discussion takes as its background a particular view of language

and of language acquisition grounded in the work of Noam Chomsky. According
to Chomsky, the human mind is inhabited by a specific module which handles
language. This is the Universal Grammar, which is at the base of all human
languages, and which consists in a series of parameters which are set
differently for different languages. Seen from the point of view of language
acquisition, the UG is linked to the LAD - the Language Acquisition Device -
which can be thought of as a program which enables the child to set the
parameters of the UG on the basis of what she hears speakers say around her.

This is an unconscious process - the child does not usually hypothesize about
language out loud, but simply goes about its daily business, incidentally
acquiring the language. This vision of language acquisition is often linked to the
idea of there being a 'critical period' - that is to say that anyone who has not
learned a language before a certain age will never be able to do so. Steven
Pinker cites the case of Chelsea ; doctors had diagnosed her as being mentally
subnormal, and it was only when she was over thirty years old that a neurologist
discovered that she was, in fact, deaf. She was fitted with hearing aids, and now
hears very well. But this meant that she discovered spoken language when she
was already an adult; as a result, says Pinker, she is unable to sequence her
utterances correctly, and produces such sentences as 'I Wanda be drive come,'
or 'Orange Tim car in'.

So that leaves us with a number of queries:

 1. First, are Chomsky's UG, and the conception of the human mind that
underlies it, a good working model of language? Does the LAD have any
reality outside schools of linguistics? A lot of linguists and psychologists
are skeptical - it's very difficult to find a Chomskian in France. (And see
the work of Elizabeth Bates)
2. Second, if UG and LAD do cut the mustard, is there really a critical
period? Once again, opinions remain divided - as Lenneberg remarked of
Genie, the individuals whose cases have been advanced as
demonstrating this effect have such unusual histories as to make it
difficult to accurately isolate the causes of their linguistic incapacities.
3. Third, if First Language Acquisition (FLA) is governed by the LAD, is the
same thing true of Second Language Acquisition (SLA)? And if this *is*
the case, can adolescents and adults ever hope to learn a foreign
language successfully, given that they are past the critical period? Or is it
perhaps the case that, once the LAD has been put to work in infancy, it
remains available for later use?

It is against this background that the debate between Ron Sheen and Stephen
Krashen has been taking place. As we have seen, Ron Sheen believes that
adults and adolescents do not acquire language in the same way as children,
whereas Stephen Krashen thinks that there is a good chance that they do.
Krashen's conception of how we acquire a second language will be found in a
number of books and articles. These are readable and make immediate sense
to most practicing teachers. He advances a set of five 'hypotheses' which
account for how readily any learner will or will not acquire an FL. I'm rather
reticent about the use of the word 'hypothesis', as I feel that this should be
reserved for statements that are rather more formal and, in particular, testable.
As we'll see, not everyone agrees that the five hypotheses are testable. So I call
them 'thunks'. This isn't a put-down; my own understanding of scientific method
is closer to Paul Feyerabend's than to Popper's. I see the thunk as a valuable
and valid mode of procedure, particularly in the social sciences, so-called. Let's
have a look at Thunk 1.
Acquisition/Learning

Stephen Krashen makes a distinction between Acquisition and Learning. We

have seen this surface in the current debate. Krashen's claim here is that there
are two ways of getting knowledge about language: on the one hand, we have
the approach to knowledge-getting that typifies the classroom of yesterday - the
learner consults rules of grammar, lists of vocabulary, and so on. This is what is
referred to as Learning. It is a conscious process, demanding effort and
attention to the task in hand. This can be contrasted with the way in which the
child absorbs the mother tongue: it is only rarely that the infant shows any
conscious effort in his increasing mastery of language - most of the time, he
progresses while attending to other business. This is acquisition.

Acquisition, Krashen believes, is the royal road to FL mastery. Learning has

some utility, for it allows the student to construct a Monitor - we'll come to that
later - which checks on the output to ensure that it is correct. But acquisition is
your main man. Learning the rules of how to construct a passive sentence will
not place the construction in your usable, unconscious grammar, where it would
be available to generate discourse. There is no interface between learning and
language acquisition.

There are numerous objections to be made to this position, but I'll stick with one
here. It can be argued that the distinction is simplistic; human learning is a
multi-faceted skill that calls on a number of different processes that work
together. Some of these are unconscious, others are conscious, and yet others
are sometimes one and sometimes the other. Anderson, for example, argues
that all knowledge is, at one stage, explicitly stated or explicitly modeled - it is
Declarative. We often forget this, believing that such and such a skill is semi-
natural - think of riding a bicycle - and suppressing the hours of instruction that
actually were necessary. By this time, the formal rules or demonstrations have
gone under cover, and our knowledge has become Procedural.

There is no warranty, in this view, for the claim that 'learning' cannot aid in the
acquisition of any kind of knowledge - and no reason to believe that language is
different in this regard. This is, I suspect, one of the fundamental points at issue
between Ron Sheen and Stephen Krashen in their recent posts. Whether Ron
Sheen believes in a LAD or not, I do not know. But he certainly rejects the idea
that learning cannot help the learner towards fluency.

Thunk 2

If language acquisition is powered by a specific program, and if this program is

innate, we would expect all language acquirers to move along the same
pathway to mastery. There would be a predictable and necessary sequence of
acquisition. Furthermore, if the LAD remains available to adult learners, the
acquisition process will be the same as it is for children, and adults learning
English as an L2 would, all things being equal, follow the same pathway as
children.

This leads us to what Stephen Krashen calls The Natural Order Hypothesis
When Chomsky's work first emerged, it offered some very exciting possibilities
to psychologists and those interested in child development. People began
looking to the way children acquire language to see if they could find any
confirmation of Chomsky's ideas. One of those who worked in this field was the
psychologist, Roger Brown. Brown recorded the utterances of children at
several stages in their development, and examined the speech, looking for
regularities. He found them; in particular, he found regularities in the order of
acquisition of a number of 'grammatical morphemes'.

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' what Brown discovered was that when the children he studied did acquire
these items, they appeared in the same order in all cases. This appeared to
lend some credence to the idea that children are programmed to learn
language.

If we turn to SLA, then we find that something similar occurs ; work carried out
by Dulay and Burt, and by Krashen himself, suggests that there is an order of
acquisition for a number of grammatical morphemes which all learners of EFL
follow, whatever their language of origin. Thus, for example, the 's' of the third
person singular of verbs in the present tense is acquired late, whereas the 's' of
plural nouns is acquired early. (The order of acquisition for EFL is similar but not
exactly identical to the order of acquisition for English as mother tongue).

The results here seem pretty robust, although they have not remained un-
criticized. One point that has been made is that whereas Brown studied the
same children and followed them through time, the SLA studies simply took
groups of learners at different levels of acquisition and compared their
production - so we have no way of knowing whether individual learners actually
acquired the morphemes one after the other. Another point is that there appears
to be no particular relationship between the different morphemes, and that the
results are theoretically uninteresting. A third point is that there may be other
reasons than pre-programming to account for the order: it could be that the 's' of
the 3PS is far more often redundant than is the 's' of the plural noun. It is
certainly the case that irregular verbs - the past tense of which is acquired
before the regular past - are more phonologically marked than is the 'ed' ending.

However, there are other reasons for believing that there may be something of
a natural order. If we look at certain grammatical structures - the negation is a
case in point - we can see that both children and adult learners of English seem
to pass through a series of stages in their acquisition. First of all, they produce
single-word utterances, consisting simply of the negative word - 'No' or 'not'.
Then they produce two-word and three-word utterances, with the negative word
as the beginning - 'No car', 'No Mummy come'. Later, they place the negative
word inside the utterance - 'Daddy not here'. And so on. Adult learners of EFL
seem to follow roughly the same pathway as children do, although the speed
with which they travel may differ according to the extent to which their mother-
tongue differs from English.

Now, one corollary of the Natural Order is that correction of errors is, in most
cases, something of a waste of time. This certainly appears to be the case in so
far as children are concerned. Here is a dialogue reported by Martin Brain, and
cited in Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'. A father - a linguist - is talking to his
daughter.
Child : Want other one spoon, Daddy.

Father : You mean, you want THE OTHER SPOON.

Child : Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.

Father : Can you say "the other spoon"?

Child : Other ... one ... spoon.

Father : Say "other".

Child : Other.

Father : "Spoon".

Child : Spoon.

Father "Other ... spoon."

Child : "Other ... spoon. Now give me other one spoon?

I suspect that many of you language teachers out there will find food for thought
in the above. Note, by the way, how modeling the language after an error does
not have the desired effect : the child misinterprets the father's intervention as a
reminder to use 'please' when making a request, and simply does not hear the
difference between her own utterance and that of her father. A couple of days
ago, one of my students persisted in placing an unnecessary 'h' at the head of
all words beginning with a vowel. The class worked with her on this for about
two minutes, at the end of which it emerged that she had no idea that she had
made an error, and had not identified any difference between her own utterance
and my reformulation or those of other class-members.

In this view, correcting an error, or giving grammatical instruction, will only have
an effect if the learner is actually at the stage when that specific piece of
information is pertinent, and then only if she is receptive to outside help.
Obviously, in a class of 35 students there is little chance that they will all need
instruction on the same grammatical point at the same time. So there is not
much point in lock-step grammar instruction - although Stephen Krashen does
allow that it will be of some use to those learners who demand it if it is given
comprehensibly in the Target Language - for then it will be motivated CI.
On this point, there does seem to be a fair degree of agreement among SLA
researchers. Krashen's position is particularly radical, but I think very few of the
experts today see grammar teaching as crucial to language acquisition. It may
help people get through the stages more quickly, but will not change the order
of acquisition, and needs to be delivered at the right moment for it to be useful.
How do we know what the right moment is?

By the way, my own deepest disagreement with Ron Sheen is on the utility of
instruction in grammar. But I do not found my objections to grammar-teaching
on the argument from the LAD - which is, to my mind, a mythical beastie of
Jabberwockian proportions - but because the grammar taught in schools is
wrong and misleading, and cannot be otherwise.

Thunk 3 - The Input hypothesis

Although Stephen Krashen's general theory is usually referred to as the Monitor

Theory, the bit that puts grit under people's collars is this one. You can imagine
that it goes something like this:

Babies do not speak. However, we know that they listen. They are already
listening while they are in the womb, for they recognize their mothers' voices
from the moment they are born. (Françoise Dolto, the French child
psychoanalyst used to claim that they actually understand what their mothers
are saying even before they are born, but that sounds a little far-fetched to me).
After a few weeks, they begin to babble - and quite soon, the babbling begins to
echo the sounds of the mother tongue. So they are listening. They keep on
listening for quite some time before they actually say anything. Yet during this
time, they are processing language, and getting ready to talk.

In areas without a modern monolinguistic state there may be a high density of

languages, and a man or woman who moves around a lot will have to learn
several tongues. It has been observed in a number of cases that the learner
spends some time simply listening to what is being said, without attempting to
join in. The time that he or she spends in this way may be quite long - anything
up to a few months.
These two sets of observations lead some theorists to believe that there is a
necessary 'Silent Period' - TPR is based on this idea - during which the learner
listens to, absorbs and processes the language. How the processing is carried
out is something of a mystery.

Stephen Krashen takes a further radical step: he says that listening - input - is
all that is necessary to language acquisition. So long as the learner receives
comprehensible input, he or she will automatically (all things being equal - see
Thunk 5) become competent in the new language. In such societies as our own
- literate ones - the input can be both oral and written. What is important is that
the learner should want to listen or to read the material, on the one hand, and
that it should be comprehensible on the other. It should not be too easy - in that
case there is nothing new to learn - or too difficult, but should be pitched at such
a level that the learner must work a little in order to understand.

Part of the teacher's job is to provide the scaffolding which enables the learner
to understand it. Gestures, pictures, realia can all help towards this end. The
material should also contain enough language that is just a little ahead of the
learner's present level of competence. This is the i+1 that Stephen put me right
over a couple of days ago. As we can never be absolutely sure where 'i' is with
any one learner, and as we may want several learners to work from or on the
same material, we cannot choose texts that are fine-tuned to the learners'
needs. But that's all right; we don't have to do so. If the texts are rough-tuned, if
they are rich enough to contain a little i+1, and if they are sufficiently
contextualized so that the i+2 and the i+3 do not trip the learners up, acquisition
will take place.

Teachers, then, should not be challenging learners to speak all the time: a
learner will talk when he or she is good and ready, and if s/he remains silent,
s/he has good reasons for doing so. In any case speaking and writing do NOT
lead to acquisition. Output is not a necessary part of the learning process. Of
course, if the learner *wants* to speak, we are not going to stop her. But if she
doesn't, that's fine.
Now, this particular thunk cuts across the grain of classroom practice; even
today, I believe that most teachers in most schools spend a great deal of their
time trying to entice their pupils into production. This often begins on the first
day of the first year in the FL, and term reports by language-teachers are full of
remarks about how much or how little their charges participate. If Stephen
Krashen is right, then this energy is mis-spent and teaching is poorly focused.

As you may imagine, the input hypothesis has come in for some stick. (By the
way, one point I'm not clear on is whether the language provided as input
should be specially produced for the learner or not. Stephen Krashen has
pointed out that people tend to talk in a peculiar way when addressing non-
native speakers - foreigner talk - that simplifies the grammar and the
vocabulary, and that this is, in some ways, similar to 'motherese' (baby-talk) -
and there is some indication that special texts need to be produced, particularly
in the early stages of learning. However, Stephen's present position in favor of
'whole-language' suggests to me that he may now balk at the idea of modified
input).

How does input-only stand up to the beating? Well, I think that in part, it stands
up fairly well: nearly all SLA experts who are bothered about what happens in
classrooms - and not all of them are - agree that input is extremely important,
and that learners should be spending far more time than they used to on
listening to or reading in the foreign language. But criticism there has been.

First, the critics have focused on the concept of 'comprehensible input' itself,
and have indicated that Krashen is not altogether clear about what he means by
this term. Sometimes it appears that it is the language itself that should be
comprehensible, and sometimes it is to be rendered comprehensible through
external contextual clues.

Second, critics have challenged the idea that output is of no value in language
acquisition. As I think the arguments here are of central interest to practicing
teachers, (and as I have to go off and teach) I shall hold them back for two later
posts which will be labeled 'Thunk 3 - Comprehensible?' and 'Thunk 3 - Input
and Output'
Thunk 4 - the Monitor and insomnia

It could be a bit like this ... Stephen Krashen denies that there is an interface
between conscious conning of the rules of language and acquisition of those
rules. It could seem, then, that there is little point in spending a great deal of
class-room time in communicative classrooms on grammar instruction. CI, in
sufficient quantities, will provide the learner with full competence.

Such a position is distressing to many people working within the language

industry. Most of them have, after all, spent quite some time over the rules of
grammar, and many of them look upon their knowledge of the formal aspects of
language as fundamental to their status and self-image. Certification in
university language departments demands a high degree of such knowledge,
and any teacher within a state school needs certification. Stephen Krashen's
model of the role between learning and acquisition would appear, at first, to
point to a radical redefinition of the teacher's role, and of her area of expertise.

However, all is not lost; some solace for the grammarian is at hand. There is a
role for learning. Formal knowledge of the rules will be incorporated in the
Monitor, which may be thought of as a sort of miniature Ron Sheen abiding
somewhere behind your left ear, ready to crack the whip whenever he suspects
you are going to Get it Wrong. The Monitor, then, is a kind of linguistic Super-
ego that has wandered in from the colloquium of Freudians down the block
while the author wasn't looking, and has deftly taken control of his pen, bridling
his Thing (Jones's squeamish translation as 'Id' is to be tromped upon) so as to
ensure that SK retains at least a semblance of respectability and charm.
(Charm, as the psychoanalytically inclined will know, emanates from the Thing
held upon a loose rein. SK, a Good Bad Boy, as Leslie Fiedler might put it, is
the Tom Sawyer of Applied Linguistics).

The Monitor is another of those ideas that seems to make sense; we all know
the sensation of suddenly focusing on how we are saying something, rather
than on what we want to mean, and we may usefully think of this mode of
operation as plugging in a grammar book at the required moment.
In fact, by most standards, the Monitor is something of a slouch. We are told
that the conditions under which it operates are such as to limit its usefulness
quite considerably. The user has to be willing to focus on form, has to have the
time to do so, and - for the Monitor to be positive in its interventions - has to
possess an adequate set of rules. As we'll see in my second post on Thunk 4,
these are difficult conditions to fulfill.

Before I stagger back to bed - this, like other posts in the series, is the product
of a vicious attack of early-morning insomnia - a word about one criticism that
has been made of the Thunk on this list. Avigail Vincente has inveighed against
the Monitor as being a mere metaphor - but that's not the problem: Science, like
all forms of discourse, has recourse to metaphor ceaselessly. The distinction
between scientific metaphors and others has been most thoroughly tossed
around by the learned - you'll often hear 'testability' mentioned, along with other
such honorable qualities as elegance or agreement. However, when all is said
and done, the basic criteria are:

a : it goes BANG very loudly and leaves a large hole in the ground. and/or

b : someone gets paid for doing it by a recognized scientific institution.

Of the two, a is far away the most important. It follows that *all* applied
linguistics is a bit scientific, but not very much.

Hoodlums, hussies and Thunk 5: the Affective Filter

The previous brings us, by hook and crook, to the Affective Filter. Stephen
Krashen (BTW, I'll just repeat here that I believe that the impact of his work on
the language teaching profession has been positive - I have even defended it
on SLART, where the majority opinion, lead by Kevin Gregg, was more than a
little frosty) introduces this idea in his fifth hypothesis. It is a fully integral part of
the whole theory, and is of some importance in its maintenance; he needs to tell
us why it is, if an adequate amount of CI is sufficient for acquisition to take
place, people who have been exposed to similar amounts of CI do not always
achieve similar levels of competence, and why some people who have been
exposed to a great deal of CI nevertheless fossilize at relatively low levels of
language mastery.

Stephen Krashen's answer to this conundrum is the Affective Filter; the concept
is drawn from Dulay and Burt. People whose attitudes towards language-
learning are, for one reason or another, negative, will acquire less than those
whose attitudes are positive - they have high Affective Filters, which keep the
input out of the part of your mind responsible for acquisition. Here, there are two
points we can note: first is that the effects of attitude factors are most marked
on acquisition, rather than on learning. Second, while a positive attitude is a
necessary pre-condition for acquisition to take place, it does not play a direct
role in the process, which remains entirely driven by CI.

Stephen Krashen offers three ‘affective variables' that have been identified as
being related to language-acquisition: these are ‘motivation', ‘self-confidence'
and ‘anxiety'. It's worth noting that none of these can be considered as totally
independent variables: success in learning may heighten motivation and self-
confidence while lowering anxiety. Moreover, it is arguable that a certain level of
anxiety is actually conducive to learning/acquisition, and recent research on
‘self-image' indicates that it is not as important for learning as the philosophers
of happiness would have us believe - humiliation may, as any Zen master will
tell you, be an excellent pedagogical technique under certain conditions, and
the humble and the self-disbeliever are not forever condemned to
unenlightenment (I personally think of myself as disgusting, repellent and
incompetent, but I know quite a lot of stuff, and master at least one foreign
language).

To some SLA people, this fifth hypothesis is simply a cop-out; it makes the
whole set of hypotheses virtually unstable, for it offers a quick getaway
whenever the cops arrive on the scene armed with contrary data. Moreover, it is
a simple and rather childish metaphor, rather than a sternly scientific attempt to
tell the world as it is. I'm pretty sure Krashen will reject the first criticism, and
that he will feel unhappy about the second: for my part, I'm not convinced that
all scientific statements either are or need to be falsifiable, and I am fairly
certain that they are all, at the core, metaphoric. What bothers me about this
hypothesis is that it shares with much American psychology - Jerome Bruner
has quite recently made a similar observation in the pages of the NYRB - a kind
of shallowness that betokens an inability to speak of mysteries.

We have created a world from which Desire has been evacuated. In our
schools, we try to pretend that children between the ages of ten and fifteen -
when any biologist will tell you that they are going through enormous changes,
both wonderful and frightening - do not have bodies, except when they take to
the sports field. We are then peeved when they put far more energy into the
school football match than they ever will do into learning math or Spanish (one
of the reasons TPR works is that it puts bodies back into the classroom - as
Asher was fully aware). The mother who is more interested in getting her son
back on the sports field than in encouraging him to get high grades - and what
idiot ever dreamt up the idea of punishing poor school-work by banning children
from physical activity? - is a wise woman who knows what her son really needs.

Desire - which Freud erroneously equated with sexuality - does not have a filter
effect upon acquisition or learning, but is constitutive. Motivation, which is a kind
of card-board cut-out representation of desire, may get you good grades, but
without desire nothing will be traced upon your soul. And if desire is denied then
it will most likely seep back at the edges, and a schoolgirl make an ugly remark
to her teacher*.

I am not saying that schools should be places where children are simply let off
the reins; on the contrary. Any society needs to shape and channel Desire. But
our societies seem almost to have given up on the shaping and the channeling,
and to believe that if you ignore it steadily enough, it will go away. It needs to be
put at the centre of the educational process where it belongs, and where, one
way or another, it will out in any case.