Stephen Krashen’s Hypotheses

• Acquisition Vs. Learning: Tries to explain, at least in part, the cognitive operations involved in language acquisition.

Learning a language is an intellectual process. It involves mastering a set of rules which are then used to understand and produce utterances in the target language. Acquiring a language is an experiential process. It involves taking part in a variety of meaningful experiences which are directed by and accompanied by the TL.

Second Language Acquisition uses the language faculty in essentially the same unconscious way as L1 acquisition. In language learning, knowledge is gained through conscious understanding of the rules of the L.

LAD

(Krashen) it is made up of the natural L learning abilities of the human mind, totally available in L1 acquisition, available in L2 acquisition according to the level of the filter. (LAD – Chomsky) the process of learning uses faculties of mind outside the LAD (mental organ devoted to Language) 

• Natural Order: Suggests that the structures of a L will be acquired in approximately the same order, regardless of what is being taught in a formal setting.
• Monitor: A trigger in the brain that applies rules that have been learned in order to accurately produce or interpret a message in the TL. It makes the speaker aware of a mistake. For the monitor to work effectively, the speaker must know the rule, have time to think of the rule and apply it, and be in a setting in which it is appropriate to focus on form.
• Input: Suggest that the most important factor in the amount of language acquired by a learner is the amount of Comprehensible Input to which that learner is exposed. CI is the amount of L that the learner can fully understand plus just a little more: i+1. Learner must always be challenged but never to a point at which frustration sets in.

Listening is the crucial activity. Learners acquire a new L by hearing. Speaking is either unnecessary or is it possible harmful; active knowledge of how to use a second language never comes from production, is the result and not its cause.

• Affective Filter: A filter in the brain erects to block out SL input in the presence of anxiety or low self-confidence or in the absence of motivation. The filter goes down and the input can come through when motivation is high and when the learning takes place in an anxiety-free environment.

Language Acquisition theory suggests that the L to which learners are exposed should be as natural as possible. Meaningfulness and interest for the learner may well be the most significant factor of all. Acquisition takes place best in a setting in which meaning is negotiated through interaction.

Evidence for the Input Hypothesis

• People speak to children acquiring L1 in special ways.
• People speak to L2 learners in special ways.
• L2 learners often go through an initial silent period.
• More CI, more proficiency
• Less CI delays L acquisition.

(-)

• Lack of definition of CI itself. Lacks on explicit independent specification of the linguistic forms used in CI and of the types of situational help that make them comprehensible.
• The implied relationship between listening and speaking: practice in speaking is helpful to L2 acquisition. Speech is an important source of information in a hypothesis testing view of language. Listening is ineffective if it is not within a process of interactive negotiation.
•   No exact definition of CI is provided. No clear way of separating acquisition from learning, no real evidence for the monitor, no real explanation for the natural order, and so on. The Input Hypothesis model is too vague and too unsupported to count as an empirically verifiable model of SLA that is more than metaphoric. It does not have sufficient substance on which to build newer and better theories.