Krashen's Essay

Pontificia universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Instituto de Ciencias del lenguaje

Procesos de Aprendizaje de la Lengua Extranjera

Sra. Pilar Morán Ramírez.

Krashen’s Hypotheses

And

Criticisms

GIANINNA SCHADE PINO.

Introduction

Stephen Krashen has a big influence on educational research and practice. He introduced his theories 20 years ago. In 1983 he published “The natural approach” with the help of Tracey Terrell. In this book they combined a comprehensive second language acquisition theory with a curriculum for language classrooms.

In these days his influence is in the debate about Bilingual Education.

Although the theories of Krashen are very appealing he failed to provide better explanations about each theory.

How second language is acquired?

Krashen’s Hypotheses.

Krashen states five hypotheses, these are:

• The acquisition/learning hypothesis

• The natural order hypothesis

• The input hypothesis

• The monitor hypothesis

• The affective filter hypothesis

I - The acquisition/learning hypothesis:

Krashen makes a distinction between learning (the procedure employed in most traditional classrooms) and acquisition (the process by which a learner learns a language). Acquisition is unconscious; the learner hears language all around him and instinctively works out the grammar that is stored some where in his brain in the LAD (Language Acquisition Device). Learning is a conscious process that requires effort directed towards analyzing the target language.

According to Krashen’s conceptions to master a certain language we must have acquired first. Maybe Formal learning may give us specific grammar rules but this doesn’t indicate that we will use them appropriately or skillfully.

Some learners are more successful than other because of their attitude and linguistic aptitude towards the acquisition of a language. Aptitude may be related to conscious learning and second language attitude refers to acquirers’ orientations concerning to speakers of the target language although personality factors are also implicated.

Krashen state that learning an L2 is very similar to learning an L1. To focus on the language, no conscious effort needs to be made; but if people pay attention to what they are hearing or reading, the ability to produce language, will come of their own treaty.

The experiment in the Canadian primary school (French through immersion), producing children who had a native level comprehension (in listening and reading); they had an excellent accent, but it did not seem necessary to give them grammatical structures that were essential for the production of well-formed expressions.

This was produce assuming these facts:

The children were not expected to speak in complete sentences

The learners always can interpret what they are learning relating these contents with the natural context

They didn’t have the formal lessons of French grammar, so they couldn’t drained their attention to the action of produce correct syntactic forms.

These suggest that Krashen is mistaken in his hypotheses:

THE INPUT HYPOTHESIS: Productive behavior is not necessary to language acquisition. If we mean by acquisition the ability to produce correct utterances (orally and writing), we can say that he is mistaken. He suggests that learned language (grammar rules) are only used when we produce writing language, but people seems to need these rules in order to speak well; these ideas lead us to think that the dissimilarity affirmed by Krashen between acquisition and learning, is only an oversimplification.

Krashen’s hypotheses provide us a scaffold within which a number of missing pieces can be found.

How is an L2 stored in our brains?

Krashen doesn’t really explain us some of his assumptions, for example:

The process of acquisition; how does a learner build his second language behavior from input alone?

Why the acquired information is more accessible than the learned information?

We can say that the difference between acquired and learned information is that the both of them are two separate stages of the learning process, concerning to shifted information from the conscious to the unconscious field.

Rival Hypothesis: By Anderson

He states that learning is a process of assimilation where new information is processed by the brain and then is incorporated in the existing knowledge.

By Anderson, the brain has two types of memory:

Short term Memory (Working memory: Predetermined storage space that we use to carry information at the same time as we use it.

Long-term memory: Information is stocked in associative networks.

Anderson explain us that learning occurs, when the information that is short term memory is incorporated in the network system (we associate the new information with already existing ideas).

Anderson states the existence of two kinds of knowledge:

Declarative Knowledge: Knowledge about the learner’s environment, it’s conscious and stored as a series of metaphors or statements.

Procedural knowledge: Consists in routines or events, it’s unconscious and let us get declarative knowledge into use. The procedural knowledge of our mother tongue allows us to build correct grammar structures without deliberately thinking about it.

By Anderson Learning Process has 3 stages:

Cognitive Stage: This stage is involved with the declarative knowledge (Conscious information), the information is learned through rules (For L2 learners this would include grammar rules); the learner studies the rule on his own, he also may receive instruction from an expert. The learner may describe the rules but he doesn’t use them competently. For Anderson the model of L2 learning is the classroom, in other words learners being instructed by a teacher.

Associative Stage; In this stage two things may occur:

Errors in the declarative statements are detected

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