An except from THEORY VERSUS PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE TRAINING

 The acquisition Learning distinction has been the most useful to me in

understanding second language acquisition. We think that for adopts approaching a
second language with the intent to “lean” it there are two ways: (1) they can
“acquire”, which is the way children “get” their first language, subconsciously,
through informal, implies learning.  Once you have acquired something you’re not
always aware you have done it. It just feels natural, it feels so if it has always been
there. Quite distinct from acquisition is (2) conscious language learning. This is
knowing about language, explicit, formal linguistic knowledge of the language. We
generally see this in language classrooms. To make it long story short, our
conclusion after a few years of research is that the first way, acquisition, is central,
… more important than we even thought it was, and that the second one, learning,
is in fact peripheral.

When we get out fluency in a second language, when we can use it easily for
communication, it comes from acquisition, not from learning. Learning, we think,
has a limited function in language performance. It can only function as a monitor,
as an editor. We apply learning after the utterance has already been generated, or
sometimes after we say it by way of self-correction. So, we use learning to make
corrections, in fact only to make small corrections. We can use learning only for
very simple rules, the ones that are easy to teach, easy to remember. Also, we
hypothesize that the things we can consciously monitor are not very important for
communication. They are the fine tuning, the things that give speech a more
finished look. This brings us to the subject of error correction. People ask me
whether error correction is good. As a first attempt at trying to answer that
question. I hypothesize that error correction is aimed at learning. When you make a
mistake, if your teacher corrects it, what he is trying to get you to do is change or
recall your conscious mental representation of the rule. An ESL student is
supposed to think. Oh, yes, that is third person, not first person. That is what is
supposed to happen. So theoretically, error correction is aimed at learning not at
acquisition.

 So conscious learning does have some function, but it turns out to be quite a small
function, relatively small with respect to acquisition. We now hypothesize that if
you want to monitor successfully, many conditions have to be met, and these are
necessary conditions. For example, you have to have time if you want to use
conscious rules. Do you know what I do in the language I’m intermediate at? I plan
my next sentence. Do you do this? I note whether the verb is subjunctive or not,
whether I’ve got the subject-verb agreement and whether I’ve done all the
contractions.

But while I’m doing all this, my conversational partner is not waiting. He is
talking. I’m not listening. I’m busy planning. So I rapidly lose touch with the
conversation. That is what happens when you overuse the monitor in conversation.
You get in trouble. So you have to have time. We find that second language
performers, when we put them in positions where they cannot monitor and only
have to think about what they are saying but not how they are saying it, display the
same error patterns that children make. I’m oversimplifying it grossly, but that is
the thrust. Under these conditions we see the acquisitions laid bare.