Learning Japanese as a Second Language: A Processability Perspect ...

namely acquisition and learning. Acquisition is the subconscious process similar to children’s first language acquisition in which the learners ‘feel’ correctness by intuition. Learning, by contrast, is the conscious process of mastering the rules of the target language. Krashen claimed that the two individual processes coexist in adult language learners and that successful SLA is the result of acquisition rather than learning.

2. The natural order hypothesis: This hypothesis originated from morpheme studies. Brown’s (1973) longitudinal study of morpheme acquisition of first language with children as well as a study of children acquiring ESL (Dulay & Burt, 1974) showed ‘natural acquisition order’. From these studies, Krashen (1982) hypothesised that ‘the acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a predictable order’ (p. 12).

3. The monitor hypothesis: This hypothesis explains how two separate processes of developing competence, acquisition and learning, operate. According to Krashen’s hypothesis, acquisition initiates utterances in SLA and is responsible for fluency. Learning has a totally different function from acquisition, and plays the role of a monitor. In other words, the produced utterances under an acquired system are monitored and changed before the output. In this way, conscious learning plays only a limited role in SLA.

4. The input hypothesis: This hypothesis explains how L2 learners acquire languages. When the learner’s current stage of competence is ‘stage i’, he/she is able to move to the next stage when he/she understands input containing ‘i+1’ (i.e., a little beyond ‘i’). The understanding of ‘i+1’ is realised with the aid of not only linguistic knowledge, but also context and extralinguistic knowledge. Production ability of stage ‘i+1’ emerges when input is understood and communication is successful.

Krashen used the examples of ‘caretakers’ speech’, ‘foreigner talk’, and ‘teacher talk’ as evidence supporting the hypothesis. In children’s first language acquisition, caretakers tune their language to the children’s current stage. Children then acquire ‘i+1’ from the caretakers’ speech. Krashen claimed that this is the same as ‘foreigner talk’ or ‘teacher talk’ in SLA, where the speaker uses a simplified code that supplies ‘i+1’ to the learners.