Second Language Acquisition

1390 Words6 Pages
Stephen Krashen's theory of second language acquisition Krashen explains his theory through five hypotheses which are discussed below in an integrated manner. The hypotheses that are used to explain this theory are: learning hypothesis, the monitoring hypothesis, natural order hypothesis, input hypothesis and affective filter hypothesis. According to the first hypothesis, Krashen (1982) argues that the acquisition of a second language is developed in two modes which are claimed to be independent of each other. Under this hypothesis, krashen shows how the learning process takes place as subconscious process and goes further to tie the second hypothesis to the first one. In the second hypothesis, he explains how the acquired language through the hypothesis is put into application. The third hypothesis examines the acquisition of grammatical structures as being acquired in a natural, predictable and necessary order. The forth hypothesis takes on from the third and under it Krashen argue that a second language learner should be taught to speak but that it should flow naturally. The last hypothesis is on effective hypothesis examines how affective factors named as attitude, motivation, anxiety and self-confidence does contribute to the amount of comprehensible input. The argument underlined in this last hypothesis is that the weakening of the affective filter is quite significant to the attaining of SLA (Krashen, 1982). In his theory Krashen explains that tedious drills as well as extensive grammatical rules are not necessary for acquisition of language. To Krashen acquisition of second language basically requires interaction that is meaningful with the language that one is targeting. This interaction has to be done in a way that one is not so much concerned with the utterance form but message being communicated which brings the needed understanding. For these
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