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Thunk 4 - the Monitor and insomnia
Date: Sat, 02 Oct 1999 05:50:39 +0200
From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
It could be a bit like this ... Stephen Krashen denies that there is an interface between conscious conning of the rules of language and acquisition of those rules. It could seem, then, that there is little point in spending a great deal of class-room time in communicative classrooms on grammar instruction. CI, in sufficient quantities, will provide the learner with full competence.
Such a position is distressing to many people working within the language industry. Most of them have, after all, spent quite some time over the rules of grammar, and many of them look upon their knowledge of the formal aspects of language as fundamental to their status and self-image. Certification in university language departments demands a high degree of such knowledge, and any teacher within a state school needs certification. Stephen Krashen's model of the role between learning and acquisition would appear, at first, to point to a radical redefinition of the teacher's role, and of her area of expertise.
However, all is not lost ; some solace for the grammarian is at hand. There is a role for learning. Formal knowledge of the rules will be incorporated in the Monitor, which may be thought of as a sort of miniature Ron Sheen abiding somewhere behind your left ear, ready to crack the whip whenever he suspects you are going to Get it Wrong. The Monitor, then, is a kind of linguistic Super-ego that has wandered in from the colloquium of Freudians down the block while the author wasn't looking, and has deftly taken control of his pen, bridling his Thing (Jones's squeamish translation as 'Id' is to be tromped upon) so as to ensure that SK retains at least a semblance of respectability and charm. (Charm, as the psychoanalytically inclined will know, emanates from the Thing held upon a loose rein. SK, a Good Bad Boy, as Leslie Fiedler might put it, is the Tom Sawyer of Applied Linguistics).
The Monitor is another of those ideas that seems to make sense ; we all know the sensation of suddenly focusing on how we are saying something, rather than on what we want to mean, and we may usefully think of this mode of operation as plugging in a grammar book at the required moment.
In fact, by most standards, the Monitor is something of a slouch. We are told that the conditions under which it operates are such as to limit its usefulness quite considerably. The user has to be willing to focus on form, has to have the time to do so, and - for the Monitor to be positive in its interventions - has to possess an adequate set of rules. As we'll see in my second post on Thunk 4, these are difficult conditions to fulfil.
Before I stagger back to bed - this, like other posts in the series, is the product of a vicious attack of early-morning insomnia - a word about one criticism that has been made of the Thunk on this list. Avigail Vincente has inveighed against the Monitor as being a mere metaphor - but that's not the problem : Science, like all forms of discourse, has recourse to metaphor ceaselessly. The distinction between scientific metaphors and others has been most thoroughly tossed around by the learned - you'll often hear 'testability' mentioned, along with other such honourable qualities as elegance or agreement. However, when all is said and done, the basic criteria are :
a : it goes BANG very loudly and leaves a large hole in the ground. and/or
b : someone gets paid for doing it by a recognized scientific institution.
Of the two, a is far and away the more important. It follows that *all* applied linguistics is a bit scientific, but not very much.
Regards Timothy Mason
tmason@timothyjpmason.com
P.S. Curiously, Ron Sheen argues that Krashen's work *has* left a large hole in the ground. So it must be very scientific indeed.
Université de Paris 8
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