Krashen, S. (2009 [1982]). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition.

Chicago:
Pergamon. Edición en Internet disponible en
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf
I - Introduction: The Relationship of Theory to Practice (páginas 1-8)
II - Second Language Acquisition Theory (páginas 9-31)
Introduction: The Relationship of Theory to Practice
To take a new look at an old question: the relationship between second language teaching
practice and what is known about the process of second language acquisition. The plan: The
usual way to do this is to discuss some research results first, outline a possible theory, and
then list some implications.
A. Three Approaches to Method
1. THEORY OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
As developed today, second language acquisition theory can be viewed as a part of
"theoretical linguistics", i.e. it can be studied and developed without regard to practical
application.
The hypotheses I will present have, however, been found to be consistent with a significant
amount of data, experimental and otherwise, and have not yet been confronted with serious
counterexamples, in my view. They make up, collectively, my "position". This does not mean
that I necessarily "believe" them. What it does mean is that these hypotheses are consistent
enough with existing data to be worthy of consideration, and that they appear to capture the
data better than other existing generalizations.
2. APPLIED LINGUISTICS RESEARCH
This research, rather, is aimed at solving practical, real problems that confront society.
An example that will be important to us in our discussion of language teaching consists of
experiments that compare teaching methods. Quite simply, a group of students is taught a
foreign language using method A (e.g. audio-lingual), and another group is taught the same
language using method B (e.g. grammar-translation). The results of such an experiment
would certainly be of interest to theoreticians, since a particular theory might predict that
students studying using one method would do better than students using another. The
experiment itself, however, is designed for practical ends, i.e. to decide which method we
should use in our schools.
3. IDEAS AND INTUITIONS FROM EXPERIENCE
A third approach to method does not rely on experimentation at all. It relies, rather, on the
insights and observations of experienced language teachers and students of foreign
languages. It consists of "ideas that work", introspections by language students, and other
informal observations. While results of research are regularly presented in professional
journals, teachers' insights are not easily accessed and shared.
B. Interactions Among Approaches to Practice
Before discussing what each approach has to say about methods and materials, I would like
to make a modest proposal: the three approaches should influence and help each other.
Figure 1.1 illustrates this ideal world, with information flowing between all three areas that
influence language teaching methodology. Figure 1.2 is, however, much closer to the actual
state of affairs: there is, today, very little interaction between and among the three areas.

In reality, many researchers are no longer involved in language teaching and language
acquisition, and do not interact with teachers. There is also far too little interaction between
theoretical and applied research; those who search for the best method are often too little
concerned with the underlying theory. What is perhaps most evident is that teachers and
materials developers pay little attention to research and theorizing of any sort.
Some well-known examples of this approach include the direct application of the principles
of behaviorist psychology in the classroom, known as the audio-lingual method.
Theoreticians insisted that dialogue and pattern drill were "the way" to teach language, and
recommended techniques that felt wrong to many teachers and students. A more recent
"application of theory" was what may be called the "applied transformational grammar"
movement, which featured materials directly based on current work in theoretical syntax and
phonology.
These two theories failed. The first, behaviorist theory, failed to apply successfully to
language teaching because it was, simply, not a theory of language acquisition. The second,
TG, failed because it was a theory of the product, the adult's competence, and not a theory of
how the adult got that competence. It is not a theory of the process of language acquisition.
The "new" theory, which I will present in Chapter II, is a theory of second language
acquisition, and attempts to deal with the process of language acquisition, not its product.
C. What the Three Approaches Have to Say About Method
The purpose of this book is to summarize one current theory and state the implications of
the theory to method. Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious
grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill. It does not occur overnight, however.
Real language acquisition develops slowly, and speaking skills emerge significantly later than
listening skills, even when conditions are perfect.
D. Goals of This Book
The primary goal of this book is to present current theory and its implications. There is
another goal, however, and that is to reintroduce teachers to theory and hopefully to gain
their confidence again.
Chapter II
Second Language Acquisition Theory
This chapter summarizes current second language acquisition theory. To do this, it first
describes some very important hypotheses. The first three, the acquisition-learning
distinction, the natural order hypotheses, and the Monitor hypothesis, are reviewed
somewhat briefly, as they have been dealt with a great deal in several other books and
professional papers. Following the discussion of the input hypothesis, we turn to the concept
of the affective filter, a hypothesis as to how affective variables relate to the process of second
language acquisition.
The second portion of this chapter reviews a variety of factors that have been thought
to be related to second language acquisition success, including instruction, different measures
of exposure to the second language, and the age of the acquirer. These factors, it will be
claimed, are not really causative factors. the true causative variables in second language
acquisition derive from the input hypothesis and the affective filter--the amount of
comprehensible input the acquirer receives and understands, and the strength of the affective
filter, or the degree to which the acquirer is "open" to the input.
A. Five Hypotheses About Second Language Acquisition
1. THE ACQUISITION-LEARNING DISTINCTION
The acquisition-learning distinction is perhaps the most fundamental of all the hypotheses
to be presented here. It states that adults have two distinct and independent ways of
developing competence in a second language.
The first way is language acquisition, a process similar, if not identical, to the way children
develop ability in their first language. Language acquisition is a subconscious process;
language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are acquiring language, but are
only aware of the fact that they are using the language for communication.
The second way to develop competence in a second language is by language learning. We will
use the term "learning" henceforth to refer to conscious knowledge of a second language,
knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them.
Some second language theorists have assumed that children acquire, while adults can only
learn. The acquisition-learning hypothesis claims, however, that adults also acquire, that the
ability to "pick-up" languages does not disappear at puberty. This does not mean that
adults will always be able to achieve native-like levels in a second language. It does mean that
adults can access the same natural "language acquisition device" that children use.
The acquisition-learning distinction may not be unique to second language acquisition.
We certainly "learn" small parts of our first language in school (e.g. for most people, the
who/whom distinction), and similar distinctions have been made in other domains.
2. THE NATURAL ORDER HYPOTHESIS
One of the most exciting discoveries in language acquisition research in recent years has been
the finding that the acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a predictable
order. Acquirers of a given language tend to acquire certain grammatical structures early, and
others later. The agreement among individual acquirers is not always 100%, but there are
clear, statistically significant, similarities.
Brown (1973) reported that children acquiring English as a first language tended to acquire
certain grammatical morphemes, or functions words, earlier than others. For example, the
progressive marker ing (as in "He is playing baseball".) and the plural marker /s/ ("two dogs")
were among the first morphemes acquired, while the third person singular marker /s/ (as in
"He lives in New York") and the possessive /s/ ("John's hat") were typically acquired much
later, coming anywhere from six months to one year later.
Dulay and Burt (1974, 1975) reported that children acquiring English as a second language
also show a "natural order" for grammatical morphemes, regardless of their first language.
The child second language order of acquisition was different from the first language order,
but different groups of second language acquirers showed striking similarities.

As yet unpublished papers by Bruce (1979), dealing with Russian as a foreign language, and
van Naerssen (1981), for Spanish as a foreign language, confirm the validity of the natural
order hypothesis for other languages.
Other studies reveal the path acquirers take en route to mastery. There is surprising uniformity
here as well--acquirers make very similar errors, termed developmental errors, while they are
acquiring.
3. THE MONITOR HYPOTHESIS
While the acquisition-learning distinction claims that two separate processes coexist in the
adult, it does not state how they are used in second language performance. The Monitor
hypothesis posits that acquisition and learning are used in very specific ways. Normally,
acquisition "initiates" our utterances in a second language and is responsible for our fluency.
Learning has only one function, and that is as a Monitor, or editor. Learning comes into play
only to make changes in the form of our utterance, after is has been "produced" by the
acquired system.
The Monitor hypothesis implies that formal rules, or conscious learning, play only a limited
role in second language performance. These limitations have become even clearer as research
has proceeded in the last few years. This research, reviewed in Chapter IV, strongly suggests
that second language performers can use conscious rules only when three conditions are met.
(i) Time. In order to think about and use conscious rules effectively, a second language
performer needs to have sufficient time.
(ii) Focus on form. To use the Monitor effectively, time is not enough. The performer must
also be focussed on form, or thinking about correctness
(iii) Know the rule. This is a very formidable requirement. Linguistics has taught us that the
structure of language is extremely complex, and they claim to have described only a fragment
of the best known languages. We can be sure that our students are exposed only to a small
part of the total grammar of the language, and we know that even the best students do not
learn every rule they are exposed to.
When we put people in situations where the three conditions are met, when they have time,
are focused on form, and know the rule, the error pattern changes, reflecting the contribution
of the conscious grammar.
Monitor use results in the rise in rank of items that are "late acquired" in the natural order,
items that the performer has learned but has not acquired. Only certain items can rise in rank,
however, When Monitor use is heavy, this rise in rank is enough to disturb the natural order.
(a) Individual variation in Monitor use
(i) Monitor Over-users. These are people who attempt to Monitor all the time, performers who
are constantly checking their output with their conscious knowledge of the second language.
As a result, such performers may speak hesitantly, often self-correct in the middle of
utterances, and are so concerned with correctness that they cannot speak with any real
fluency.
(ii) Monitor under-users. These are performers who have not learned, or if they have learned,
prefer not to use their conscious knowledge, even when conditions allow it. Underusers are
typically uninfluenced by error correction, can self-correct only by using a "feel" for
correctness (e.g. "it sounds right"), and rely completely on the acquired system.
(iii) The optimal Monitor user. Our pedagogical goal is to produce optimal users, performers
who use the Monitor when it is appropriate and when it does not interfere with
communication. Many optimal users will not use grammar in ordinary conversation, where
it might interfere. In writing, and in planned speech, however, when there is time, optimal
users will typically make whatever corrections they can to raise the accuracy of their output.
4. THE INPUT HYPOTHESIS
The important question is: How do we acquire language? If the Monitor hypothesis is correct,
that acquisition is central and learning more peripheral, then the goal of our pedagogy should
be to encourage acquisition. The question of how we acquire then becomes crucial.
This section is organized as follows: I will first present the input hypothesis before giving
any supporting evidence. Following this is a description of the evidence from research first
and second language acquisition. We will then briefly cover evidence from applied linguistics
research.
(a) Statement of the hypothesis
Let us first restate the question of how we acquire: given the correctness of the natural order
hypothesis, how do we move from one stage to another? More generally, how do we move
from stage i, where i represents current competence, to i + 1, the next level? The input
hypothesis makes the following claim: a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to move
from stage i to stage i + 1 is that the acquirer understand input that contains i + 1, where
"understand" means that the acquirer is focussed on the meaning and not the form of the
message.
We acquire, in other words, only when we understand language that contains structure that
is "a little beyond" where we are now. How is this possible? How can we understand language
that contains structures that we have not yet acquired? The answer to this apparent paradox
is that we use more than our linguistic competence to help us understand. We also use
context, our knowledge of the world, our extra-linguistic information to help us understand
language directed at us.
As Hatch (1978a) has pointed out, our assumption has been that we first learn structures,
then practice using them in communication, and this is how fluency develops. The input
hypothesis says the opposite. It says we acquire by "going for meaning" first, and as a result,
we acquire structure!
We may thus state parts (1) and (2) of the input hypothesis as follows:
(1) The input hypothesis relates to acquisition, not learning.
(2) We acquire by understanding language that contains structure a it beyond our current
level of competence (i + 1). This is done with the help of context or extra-linguistic
information.
A third part of the input hypothesis says that input must contain i + 1 to be useful for
language acquisition, but it need not contain only i + 1. It says that if the acquirer understands
the input, and there is enough of it, i + 1 will automatically be provided. In other words, if
communication is successful, i + 1 is provided. As we will discuss later, this implies that the
best input should not even attempt to deliberately aim at i + 1.
Thus, part (3) of the input hypothesis is:
(3) When communication is successful, when the input is understood and there is enough of
it, i + 1 will be provided automatically.
The final part of the input hypothesis states that speaking fluency cannot be taught directly.
Rather, it "emerges" over time, on its own. The best way, and perhaps the only way, to teach
speaking, according to this view, is simply to provide comprehensible input. Early speech
will come when the acquirer feels "ready"; this state of readiness arrives at somewhat
different times for different people, however. Early speech, moreover, is typically not
grammatically accurate. Accuracy develops over time as the acquirer hears and understands
more input. Part (4) of the input hypothesis is thus:
(4) Production ability emerges. It is not taught directly.
(b) Evidence supporting the hypothesis
(i) First language acquisition in children. The input hypothesis is very consistent with what is
known about "caretaker speech", the modifications that parents and others make when
talking to young children. The most interesting and perhaps the most important characteristic
of caretaker speech for us is that it is not a deliberate attempt to teach language. Rather, as
Clark and Clark (1977) point out, caretaker speech is modified in order to aid comprehension.
Caretakers talk "simpler" in an effort to make themselves understood by the child.
A second characteristic of interest to us here is the finding that caretaker speech, while
it is syntactically simpler than adult-adult speech, is "roughly-tuned" to the child's current
level of linguistic competence, not "finely-tuned". In other words, caretaker speech is not
precisely adjusted to the level of each child, but tends to get more complex as the child
progresses.
A third characteristic of caretaker speech that concerns us is known as the "here and now"
principle. It is well established that caretakers talk mostly about what the child can perceive,
what is in the immediate environment.
While there is no direct evidence showing that caretaker speech is indeed more effective than
unmodified input, the input hypothesis predicts that caretaker speech will be very useful for
the child. First, it is, or aims to be, comprehensible. The "here and now" feature provides
extra-linguistic support (context) that helps the child understand the utterances containing i
+ 1.
(ii) Evidence from second language acquisition: simple codes. The input hypothesis also holds for
second language acquisition. First, as presented earlier, the second language acquirer, child
or adult, is also an "acquirer", just like the child acquiring first language. Also, according to
hypothesis (2), there is a natural order of acquisition for second language as well as first
language, so we can talk about the second language acquirers' i + 1 as well. Third, second
language acquirers can also receive the kind of modified input that children get.
This modified input is of three sorts. Foreigner-talk results from the modifications native
speakers make with less than fully competent speakers of their language (see, for example,
Hatch, Shapira, and Gough, 1978 for some good examples). Teacher-talk is foreigner-talk
in the classroom, the language of classroom management and explanation, when it is in the
second language. A third simple code is interlanguage talk, the speech of other second
language acquirers.
As is the case with caretaker speech, modifications made in foreigner-talk and teacher-talk
are not made for the purpose of language teaching, but are made for the purpose of
communication, to help the second language acquirer understand what is being said. Second,
the available research indicates that foreigner-talk and teacher-talk are roughly-tuned to the
level of the acquirer, and not finely-tuned.
The input hypothesis predicts that these simplified codes will be very useful for the second
language acquirer, just as caretaker speech is posited to be useful for the child. The input
hypothesis also predicts that natural, communicative, roughly-tuned, comprehensible input
has some real advantages over finely-tuned input that aims directly at I + 1, in other words,
classroom exercises that aim to teach the structure of the day.
(iii) Evidence from second language acquisition: the silent period and L1 influence. The input hypothesis
is also consistent with other findings and hypotheses in second language acquisition. One of
these can be termed the "silent period", a phenomenon that is most noticeable in child
second language acquisition.
It has often been noted that children acquiring a second language in a natural, informal
linguistic environment may say very little for several months following their first exposure to
the second language. What output there is consists usually of memorized language, whole
sentences learned as if they were one word.
The explanation of the silent period in terms of the input hypothesis is straight-forward the
child is building up competence in the second language via listening, by understanding the
language around him. In accordance with the input hypothesis, speaking ability emerges on
its own after enough competence has been developed by listening and understanding.
Adults, and children in formal language classes, are usually not allowed a silent period. They
are often asked to produce very early in a second language, before they have acquired enough
syntactic competence to express their ideas. According to a hypothesis first proposed by
Newmark (1966), performers who are asked to produce before they are "ready" will fall back
on first language rules, that is, they will use syntactic rules of their first language while
speaking the second language.
(iv) Advantages and disadvantages of L2 rule use. The substitution of some L1 rule for some i + 1
has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are short term, however, while the
disadvantages appear to be quite serious.
One obvious advantage is that the use of an L1 rule allows the performer to "outperform his
competence", to meet a practical need in L2 communication before he has acquired the
relevant i + 1 rule. Even if the L1 rule is not the same as the L2 rule, one could argue that
the performer still comes out ahead, as, quite often, he can still communicate his point
despite the incorrect form.
There are real disadvantages to falling back on the L1, however. First, the L1 rule may not
be the same as an L2 rule, as noted above, and errors can result. The conscious Monitor can
note and repair these errors in some cases, but not all, since, as we have seen the constraints
on Monitor use are severe.
(v) Applied linguistics research. The input hypothesis is also consistent with the results of what
can be called "method comparison" experiments. Several scholars and groups of scholars
have attempted to determine directly which teaching methods are best by simple comparison.
Groups of students studying second and foreign languages using two different methods are
compared, both in long-term and short-term studies.
(1) "Deductive" methods (rule first, then practice, e.g. grammar-translation and cognitive-
code) are slightly more efficient than audio-lingual teaching for adults. The differences are
often statistically significant, but are not huge. Students clearly make some progress using
any of these approaches.
(2) For adolescents, there is no measurable difference.
I interpret this failure to find large differences in this way: none of the methods compared in
these studies provides much in the way of comprehensible input! The input hypothesis
predicts, moreover, that an approach that provides substantial quantities of comprehensible
input will do much better than any of the older approaches.
5. THE AFFECTIVE FILTER HYPOTHESIS
The Affective Filter hypothesis states how affective factors relate to the second language
acquisition process.
Research over the last decade has confirmed that a variety of affective variables relate to
success in second language acquisition (reviewed in Krashen, 1981). Most of those studied
can be placed into one of these three categories:
(1) Motivation. Performers with high motivation generally do better in second language
acquisition (usually, but not always, "integrative"
(2) Self-confidence. Performers with self-confidence and a good self-image tend to do better in
second language acquisition.
(3) Anxiety. Low anxiety appears to be conducive to second language acquisition, whether
measured as personal or classroom anxiety.
The Affective Filter hypothesis captures the relationship between affective variables and the
process of second language acquisition by positing that acquirers vary with respect to the
strength or level of their Affective Filters. Those whose attitudes are not optimal for second
language acquisition will not only tend to seek less input, but they will also have a high or
strong Affective Filter--even if they understand the message, the input will not reach the part
of the brain responsible for language acquisition, or the language acquisition device.

The Affective Filter hypothesis implies that our pedagogical goals should not only include
supplying comprehensible input, but also creating a situation that encourages a low filter.