Krashen

The other authors in our readings did a pretty good job of pointing out many of the problems with Krashen’s theory of SLA. What concerns me the most with his ideas is how much he downplays the roles of production and practice. If his hypotheses are correct there is little need for students to ever speak. Students only need to have ‘low affective filters” and receive interesting and meaningful comprehensible input which is just a little above their current level, and perhaps after a “silent period” of a month to several years the student will decide to produce what he has acquired.

This view doesn’t really account for my experience in acquiring second languages, or the experiences of anyone else I know. Comprehension and production seem to me to be somewhat different processes. Most people are able to comprehend much more than they can actually produce. There is also the case of Broca’s aphasics whose comprehension is largely intact, but who have enormous difficulties in production. Of course comprehension most likely helps acquisition, but I think it more likely contributes not by focusing solely on meaning, but by paying attention to both meaning and form and in some way rehearsing constructions in our memory. For example, I don’t really have very much difficulty focusing on the meaning of what is being said as well as its form while I listen to lectures in French. When I hear a construction which is somewhat familiar to me It gets reinforced, and when I understand something produced in a new form (with the aid of extra-linguistic knowledge) I sometimes explicitly focus on the new form and attempt to store it in my memory.

It doesn’t seem reasonable that comprehensible input is “the true and only causative variable in second language acquisition”(Krashen 1983). I have always felt that producing and practicing the target language has allowed me to both practice learned forms and make them more automatic. Speaking also allows me to identify areas in my language proficiency which need more attention and those which I have little difficulty. For example, I may explicitly know how to form a passive sentence in Arabic, and I may also be able to automatically recognize when a passive is not formed correctly. When I speak, however, I may not form the passive correctly. I can immediately identify my own mistake, and realize that I have not completely mastered this construction, and through further practice make its production more automatic. If I never attempted to produce the passive I would not really know the degree to which I had acquired it.

In foreign language contexts students have very little opportunity to practice and test their linguistic skills outside of class. I am not necessarily opposed to allowing a short “silent period” while the students get more comfortable with the classroom routine, but I think production, making mistakes, and learning from them are essential to learning.