orlandohill wrote:If I understand correctly, studying grammar in this way is considered learning, but not acquisition in the terminology of Krashen's publications.
This distinction makes little sense, though. Do we talk about "acquiring" how to walk, or "learning"? Nobody gave us conscious instruction. Is it an error that we teach children how to tie their
children shoelaces [goddammit!] with direct instruction? Should they be left to "acquire" that skill? And for that matter, do we not talk about children "learning" how to talk? (Admittedly, we'll more often talk about when they "start talking", but we do use the term "learn".)
By making a distinction that doesn't match with the colloquial meaning of the words, Krashen invented a new jargon -- jargon that has been roundly rejected by the language learning community that a huge number of authors feel obliged to include a sentence rejecting Krashen's distinction and saying they use the two terms interchangeably. My go-to citation in essays was Lourdes Ortega's book Understanding Second Language Acquisition "although in the early 1980s there was an attempt at distinguishing between the two terms, in contemporary SLA terminology no such distinctionis typically upheld." (2009, p5)
The fact is that Krashen was making a distinction that others don't, and by putting words on it, he's reified the thing that people think there's a genuine difference there.
As I've often said, people who do well in L1 only classes light on rules can normally describe the rules. If Krashen's distinction held, that would mean that people who "acquire" best also "learn" the most, and the people who "learn" the least also "acquire" the worst.
This means that the two things are interlinked and not independent, which is completely contrary to Krashen's hypothesis.
I do not know for sure that this notion of successful learners being able to explain rules has been widely studied and has been statistically proven -- I may be exhibiting confirmation bias because I already believed it, after all -- but I have an image in my head of something in the university library in typewritten print from the 1980s which commented on using conscious knowledge of language as a measure because they had verified this as a valid proxy measure of language skill. (Krashen's thinking was particularly influential in the 80s, so there were lots of teachers exchewing explicit grammar instruction then. It's a pretty modern recasting of Krashen that says his views were rejected by the establishment rather than accepting that they were seized on enthusiastically by many... and then ditched because they weren't really that effective.)
Your conscious knowledge of grammar makes the texts you read more comprehensible, but the amount of language that can be acquired still has an upper bound that is determined by the amount of input you receive.
That's what Krashen said.
Now I can't give you figures to give a definitive answer, but I think this argument is common-sensical enough to take as a
sine qua non, so I reckon it's not for me to prove, but him to disprove....
In German, the verb "willen" means "to want" -- ich will = I want.
I believe that knowing this means that it will take very few encounters with the word for you to internalise the meaning. But if you were to just go into massive input blindly, you'd have L1 interference from the English word "will", and you would need far more exposure to it to internalise the meaning.
Two things I anticipate:
(1) people will say that's an extreme example, as there's clear L1 interference... but it doesn't undermine the key point. For one thing, there are lots of languages where there are false friends, so a rule that only holds in the absence of false friends isn't a universal rule... and of course English speakers are far more likely to learn something like French, Spanish or German where such things happen. For another, the false friend thing is just the most concrete example you have of generic "error" stuff, and also the most controlled -- there's lots of things that can go wrong in someone's thinking to make an error.
(2) Krashen gave himself a get-out clause for all the things he effectively says doesn't work, because his framework accepts anything that "makes the input comprehensible". I've made German more comprehensible, so the rule is good. But we've tried teaching rules and rules don't work. Except when they make input comprehensible. So how have they not worked? Because they do not/have not made input more comprehensible? But they
do make input more comprehensible -- it's easily proven!
So while he might be right that there's a theoretical upper limit given by the amount of input, the amount of input needed to "acquire" a particular language feature depends on what you're doing to learn it.
Iversen wrote:I simply don't understand how Krashen could come to the totally contra-intuitive idea that it wouldn't help to see things nicely summarized in a grammar
On which page of which publication does he say that? I have only recently begun to familiarise myself with his work, and a brief search brings up a publication where he says otherwise.
Krashen, Stephen D. "Formal grammar instruction. Another educator comments." TESOL quarterly 26.2 (1992): 409-411.Does grammar study have any effect? My interpretation of the research is that grammar learning does have an effect, but this effect is peripheral and fragile. I have argued (Krashen,1982) that conscious knowledge of grammar is available only as a monitor, or editor, and that there are three necessary conditions for monitor use: Performers need to know the rule, have enough time to apply the rule, and need to be focused on form. When these conditions are met, application of grammar rules can indeed result in increased accuracy, but the performer pays a price in decreased information conveyed, and a slower, more hesitant speech style.
Here he's talking about the skill of spontaneous speech production, but it seems reasonable to assume that a monitor could also be applied to the reception of written input.
Which is where his logic gets really tortured.
Grammar is limited use because it only teaches the monitor.
Comprehensible input is the only important thing.
A good monitor can make input more comprehensible.
And the monitor relies on grammar knowledge.
So why is grammar knowledge not a very powerful goal?