Thunk 4 - bit 2

Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 14:25:27 +0200

From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum

The grammar acquired through CI provides the learner with structured utterances. This process is unconscious. However, once the utterance has emerged into our minds, ready for the speaking, we may subject it to conscious control and approval, using the rules of grammar that we have learned in our language classes or conned from a book.

In order for this to occur, however, a number of conditions must be fulfilled. First of all, says Stephen Krashen, we must have the time at our disposal to make the correction. Under conditions of normal, informal conversation, exchange may be too fast for the speaker to allow herself a great deal of conscious control. But on more formal occasions - such as when making a public speech, for example, or when writing, the learner may allow herself time for reflection, and so be able to use the Monitor.

Of course, there is always the danger that over-use of the Monitor may slow us down to a deadly pace : our interlocutor withdraws and, not only have we lost face and the possibility of friendship, but we have also deprived ourselves of what could have been an excellent source of CI.

It might be noted here that - at least in his more popular publications - Stephen Krashen does not make much of the fact that there may be considerable variations in the speed of self-correction due to individual differences in temperament and what Anderson refers to as the speed of the General Processor, to the complexity of the rule, and to the thoroughness with which it has been learned. It is possible that the less well-integrated our knowledge of a specific rule is, the longer it will take to access it, and the more likely it is that the process of accessing it will become conscious. Again, it may be that we become more conscious of our monitoring activities when we find ourselves in the kind of situation that creates anxiety - so that we are ready to concur with SK's formulation because it agrees with our experience. The Monitor Hypothesis presents us with a picture of what Everybody Knows that makes Common Sense appear scientific. Unfortunately, what Everybody Knows and Common Sense are often very poor indicators of how stuff happens.

The second condition invoked by SK is that the speaker/writer should be focusing on form. If the learner is caught up in the conversation, s/he may forget his or her grammatical anxieties, and simply concentrate upon meaning. Once again, the model appears to formally enshrine our common-sense intuitions - but we should perhaps be wary of any easy distinction between meaning and form, for they do not stand in opposition to each other, but are rather two aspects of the same thing. To borrow a metaphor from physics, the same utterance may be considered etically as either wave or particle, depending upon how we question it. (And if, as now seems probable, rules of construction are encoded along with semantic indications in the lexicon, then meaning and form are so intricately linked that the distinction is almost pointless).

That is not to say that speakers and writers do not think about what they are saying in conscious ways on certain occasions. Writers seek precision and elegance. Speakers attempt to control and direct the flow of conversation, and may give considerable attention to this aspect of interaction under stress-high circumstances : Erving Goffman's essay 'The Neglected Situation' offers useful insight into this, as does Pierre Bourdieu's 'Ce Que Parler Veut Dire'. Just as riding our bike over rough terrain when we usually cycle on asphalt makes greater demands on conscious control even though the underlying processes are the same, so speaking in public, or in front of a selection panel, will lead to greater focus on 'correction' and precision. (Which leads us to the thought that 'grammatical correction' is mainly a question of what Bourdieu calls 'distinction' - most of the cases raised on the FLTeach list of ungrammatical utterances by American youths are not evidence of a lack of syntactical knowledge, but of a lack of social grace. It may pay to unpack the latter term, but that isn't (yet) what this thread is about).

Finally, SK makes the point that, in order for the Monitor to be used efficaciously, the speaker must know the rule. As he points out, many, if not the majority of rules underlying the sequencing of utterances are unknown. Worse, many of those that we think we do know are simply wrong and/or misleading. Our conscious application of what we believe to be the rules may, in fact, end in nonsense. Sometimes the harm is done innocently and with good intent. For example, teachers might, as someone has suggested, simplify the problems of analysis by suggesting to their students that instead of looking for the subject of a verb, they search for the doer of the action. Looks fine, but then :

'The stories collected in 'The Bloody Chamber' are undoubtedly among Angela Carter's finest writings'

What makes a verb a verb is not the fact that it represents an action, any more than what makes a subject a subject is the fact that it represents a doer of actions. The simplification, if taken to heart, will make the work of later teachers more difficult. Accurate grammars are, perhaps surprisingly, extremely difficult to think, as generations of language students have discovered to their cost. Students will come fresh from a linguistics class and micro-teach the be -ing form as 'en train de', slipping back into the misleading simplification that they were given at school. The text-books they will be using in class are still sticking to this explanation. I'd much rather they didn't teach it at all.

Timothy Mason

iufm de versailles

tmason@timothyjpmason.com

Now go on to the next one.