Krashen’s Hypotheses of Second Language Acquisition Essay -- Foreign L

Krashen’s Hypotheses of Second Language Acquisition For decades, foreign language teachers wandered in a scientific abyss. Until 1983, there had been little real research dealing with the ways in which someone acquires a second language. Teachers mostly used the audiolingual classroom model that had been in place for the past twenty years (or, even worse, the literally ancient grammatical translation model that had been used by civilizations millennia old). Clearly, language teaching methodology was in a poor situation. In 1983, however, Krashen published the results of an unprecedented body of research and paved the way for a revolution in our field. His five-point hypothesis focused on the difference between the acquisition of and the learning of a second language. Krashen has his detractors, of course, not the least of whom are American school districts, which have been reluctant to implement his teachings. Most experts agree, however, that his ideas are the most meritorious of the theories in circulation now, an d schools that refuse to incorporate them are doing their students a disservice. The first of Krashen’s hypotheses is the learning-acquisition hypothesis, which differentiates the two titular terms. According to Krashen, â€Å"acquisition† refers to the implicit knowledge we have of a language, whereas â€Å"learning† refers to explicit knowledge about a language. Implicit knowledge refers to command of a language as if it were one’s native language; explicit knowledge is what we unfortunately gain in most foreign language classes. One good example of this in Spanish is the phrase â€Å"me llamo,† which literally means â€Å"I call myself† but is usually translated by Spanish teachers as â€Å"my name is.... ... on teachers to find objective methods of evaluating students, which can be extremely difficult to do if they heed Krashen’s advice. The price that students pay for steady grading is, unfortunately, genuine competence in their chosen language, and it is far too high. The pending change in second-language teaching is often called an â€Å"incomplete revolution† because the educational establishment refuses to implement the system despite its acknowledged merits, choosing instead to languish in the mediocrity we face today. WORKS CITED Krashen, Stephen. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Pergamon Press. 1982 Omaggio, Alice C. Teaching Language in Context. Proficiency Oriented Instruction. Boston: Heinle and Heinle. 1986 Sole, Yolanda Russino. â€Å"The input hypothesis and the bilingual learner.† Bilingual Review 19:2. 99-100.