Kraut wrote:https://geof950777899.wordpress.com/sla/krashen-5-a-summary-of-responses/
Krashen 5: Summary of Responses
by
Geoff Jordan Stuff
Interesting blog post. Most of the questions derive from Krashen's Monitor and Occam's Razar, it seems, which certainly is a good article but dated. Specifically on the Input hypothesis section, he never asks any questions about cases in which, despite presence in input, structures are not acquired. Krashen is right when he says that input can lead to acquisition, but the point is that he claims that ALL acquisition comes from input only. If you can show just one example of input not causing acquisition by itself, then you've proven him wrong, which has happened already multiple times. That's specifically why I mentioned the grammatical gender example. There's simply no need to acquire it. It's also what Swain talked about with comprehensible output, that is, that she observed in French Immersion classes in Canada that many children did not acquire forms and seemed to stagnate at the same level because that level sufficed to understand what teachers were saying, and only became aware of new forms that were already present in input when forced to write in French.
I'd like to point out this quote specifically:
2. Can we acquire from our own output?
*** Krashen’s Response: This is a theoretical possibility, but so far, we don’t know if it has actually happened or can happen. If a second language acquirer monitors and produces a spoken or written sentence that contains a rule that is at that acquirer’s i+1, and the acquirer understands what he or she has written, this sentence might be able serve as comprehensible input and help lead to the acquisition of that rule. If acquiring from your own output is possible, it would open the door to a bizarre kind of pedagogy: find out what is at each student’s i+1 and set up production activities that require the use of the target rule. Of course, this “new” pedagogy would look a lot like traditional instruction. One could argue that traditional instruction, however, failed to produce real acquired competence because we didn’t know what each student’s i+1 was, and because we just didn’t demand enough output. Even if “acquire from your own output” could be shown to work, I suspect that most people would far prefer to get fresh input from others, with interesting messages, rather than constantly recycle their own production.
This is one of the internal inconsistencies in Krashen's theories. Even if you accept what Krashen's theories say as 100% true and believe that explicit knowledge can never become implicit knowledge, his theories actually allow for it, since, as Krashen himself describes above, explicit knowledge can be used in production, and then observed for "i+1" and then acquired through his input hypothesis, so explicit knowledge becoming implicit. It's absurd, and it's an easy point to criticize him on. I avoided bringing it up since it's a pretty superficial argument, it doesn't bring you anywhere to discuss it.
Here's another one:
2. You say that “a strictly linear view of the natural order hypothesis, that there is only one stream of progress that acquirers follow in strict sequence” is incorrect. Rather, “several streams of development are taking place at the same time” (1982:53-4). But you give no explanation of what a “stream of development” could be, or set any limit on the number of such “streams”.
*** Krashen’s Response: How on earth could I set a limit on the number of streams? I suggested that there may be streams. Are you insisting that all suggestions, all conjectures, all hypotheses come with precise details, overwhelming supporting evidence, and refutations to all possible counterexamples?
I actually brought up his stream of development quote in my first reply. Krashen missed the point of what Gregg originally said. Here's what Gregg was talking about in full when he brought up the several streams of development:
In fact Krashen seems to recognize this, again in a footnote, when he says that 'a strictly linear view of the natural order hypothesis, that there is only one stream of progress that acquirers follow in strict sequence' is incorrect. Rather, 'several streams of development are taking place at the same time' (1982:53-4)."What this is supposed to mean is hard to say, as Krashen gives us no explanation of what a 'stream of development could be, nor does he set any limit on the number of such 'streams'. One definite consequence of allowing more than one 'natural order', however, is to vitiate the Natural Order Hypothesis. If the structures of, say, English are divided into varying numbers of ordered sets, the number of sets varying according to the individual, then it makes little sense to talk about a 'natural order*. If the number of sets varies from individual to individual, then the membership of any given set will also vary, which makes it very difficult to compare individuals, especially since the content of these sets is virtually completely unknown. If the set of sets of structures is claimed to be invariant across individuals—that is, if it is claimed that there is one (unknown) fixed number of streams of developments— the problem of comparability would be removed, but the problem of empirical support for the hypothesis remains; in fact it becomes even greater.
The entire point was that the Natural Order hypothesis has no evidence for it, and that empirical support becomes impossible when you have possibly infinite streams of development. It means that there's no natural order at all, but Krashen can continue to use the Natural Order hypothesis to justify whatever lack of acquisition he wants. After all, if -s wasn't acquired, it just wasn't ready to be acquired yet, since something else before it needed to be acquired still. Again, though, his evidence has never been very strong, and I posted that explanation for the natural order in my first post so he really has nothing to stand on here. What's most shocking is that he continues to support it.
But then the author actually directly quotes Gregg in the question!
4. If the set of sets of structures is claimed to be invariant across individual – that is, if it is claimed that there is one (unknown) fixed number of ‘streams of development’ – the problem of comparability would be removed, but the problem of empirical support for the hypothesis remains; in fact it becomes even greater.
*** Krashen’s Response: The “problem of empirical support” is not a problem. It is an invitation to do research.
The exact same wording as Gregg in the quote above. Krashen misses the point entirely. The amount of research that would be required to do in order to empirically verify Krashen's streams of development would be impossible. You'd have to go through every single one of the structures in English and test to see if it can be acquired after another structure, and then for the structures that it was acquired after, you'd have to test every single structure for each one of them. That'd be an absurd amount of possible permutations. He's inviting people to empirically test something which is empirically testable, yes, but in practice impossible.
*** Krashen’s Response: If we find that i+1 is reasonably similar for everybody at stage i. this would be strong support for the natural order hypothesis.
A very puzzling response. What exactly is stage i in his view here? The entire set of structures that has been already acquired, accounting for multiple streams, or any stream having acquired a particular feature, that feature being the stage i? The lack of empirical support still exists.
The author holds the view that there is no way to test implicit and explicit knowledge and that they're not empirically testable. This is a very old critique of Krashen and it's wrong. We do know now that implicit and explicit knowledge are separate systems, and they can be empirically tested.
As for the efficacy of explanation and feedback, please see Explorations (2004), and the work of Truscott on error correction (and on grammar instruction in general). I have provided explanations for all published cases of where it is claimed that conscious learning of rules seems to work. And the explanations are consistent with the constraints on the conscious Monitor.
I think this is worthwhile to touch on as well. His criticisms of studies testing the effectiveness of grammar instruction are valid, or rather, were valid. This is one of the problems with the Norris and Ortega 2000 study, the actual measures of implicit and explicit knowledge weren't very well defined. That doesn't mean that the field hasn't advanced since. Rod Ellis did a study on the various empirical and implicit knowledge tests that were used (at the time), and the battery he proposed for measuring linguistic knowledge has been used since for validation studies. This isn't free from criticism however, particularly, the implicit knowledge measurement, but the criticism is mainly that the elicited imitation test might test automatized explicit knowledge. The critics do seem to be in the minority but they have a point. It's an ongoing topic of research. Kim and Godfroid (the same Kim who's dissertation I cited earlier) are currently working on a research synthesis for implicit, automatized explicit, and explicit knowledge, and specifically the measures of them, and they're going over 9 previously used measures and evaluating them. It's actually currently in the works. Interesting stuff, we'll see how it turns out, but she used the findings on that research synthesis to design the implicit and explicit measures for her dissertation, which, again, found that explicit and implicit knowledge both influence each other. I keep mentioning this study because it really is quite amazing. Kim is one of my favourite researchers and she's already contributed a lot to SLA research.
Iversen wrote:PS to Cainntear: there are no nasal vowels in Danish, but I have never had problems distinguishing them in French or Portuguese, so the mere fact that certain sounds aren't represented in your native language doesn't necessarily mean that they will cause you trouble in a target language. And if they do, then the cure is to listen closely to minimal pairs without too much surrounding babble, maybe in combination with some facts regarding mouth positions (though hardcore Krashenites would presumable frown at both propositions).[/color]
Cainntear was right about how -s can be difficult to hear, because when combined with certain consonants in a syllable coda, they have an affricate-like realization, which is less salient since it's less "sonorous". Nasal vowels on the other hand, are more sonorous, at least, according to the natural order explanation article. They give affricates a 2 and nasals a 4. So it's not only due to a lack of the sound in your native language, but rather, the sound itself. Though, both of them are quite low (the scale is out of 9). It's hard to say.
Cainntear wrote:-ed may not be fully redundant, but it's a non-syllabic bound morpheme, and it creates a consonant cluster that doesn't exist in a great many languages. It is not something the non-native ear can pick out, so it's not something that will be learned from exposure.
It isn't redundant typically, but it can be. Look at a sentence like "Yesterday, I walked home". The -ed is redundant when the past is already specified, so there's no need to look for another cue to see about what time they're referring to. -ed is, if I recall, pretty early on the order of acquisition for morphemes naturally so it's not actually that hard to acquire, I guess.
