The Role of Grammar:

Grammar as Monitor Use

Report by:
NICOLE MERUH L. VELAS

MONITOR
HYPOTHESI
S

States that Learning has only

one function, and that is as a
Monitor or Editor and that
learning comes into play only to
make changes in the form of our
utterance, after it had been
produced by the acquired system.

MONITOR
HYPOTHESI
S
The fundamental claim of Monitor Theory is that
conscious learning is available to the performer only
as a Monitor. In general, utterances are initiated by
the acquired system our fluency in production is
based on what we have picked up through active
communication. Our formal knowledge of the
second language, our conscious learning, may be
used to alter the output of the acquired system,
sometimes before and sometimes after the utterance
is produced. We make these changes to improve
accuracy, and the use of the Monitor often has this
effect.

LEARNE
D
SYSTEM
ACQUIRE
D SYSTEM

UTTERANC
E

Kinds of MONITOR USER

Monitor Over-user

People who attempt to Monitor all the time,

performers who are constantly checking their output
with their conscious knowledge of the second
language.

Monitor Under-user

Performers who have not learned, or if they have

learned, prefer not to use their conscious
knowledge, even when conditions allow it.

Monitor Optimal
User

Performers who use the Monitor when it is

appropriate and when it does not interfere with
communication.

The Role of Grammar, or Putting Grammar in

its Place

According
to
the
Monitor
Model
for
performance, conscious learning acts as an
editor, as a Monitor, correcting the errors, or
rather what the performer perceives to be errors,
in the output of the acquired system. This can
happen before the sentence is spoken, or written,
or after.

Conscious knowledge of the

rules
is
therefore
not
responsible for our fluency,
it
does
not
initiate
utterances.

The Role of Grammar, or Putting Grammar in

its Place
A. Learning does not become
Acquisition

Cognitive-code school of thought:

Once the student has a proper degree of cognitive
control over the structure of a language, facility
will develop automatically with the use of the
language in meaningful situations (Carroll, 1966,
p. 102)
Internalization
- The process od converting learned rules into
acquired rules.

The argument that conscious learning does not become

unconscious acquisition is based on three claims:
1. Sometimes there is acquisition without learning that is,
some individuals have considerabklecompetence in a second
language but do not know very many conscious rules.
2. There are casesw where learning never becomes
acquisition that is, a person can know the rule and continue
breaking it.
3. No one knows anywhere near all the rules.

The Role of Grammar, or Putting Grammar in

its Place
A. Learning does not become
Acquisition

Language acquisition happens when the

acquirer understands input containing a
structure that the acquirer is due to
acquire, a structure at his or her i + 1.
There is no necessity for previous
conscious knowledge of a rule.

Acquisition where learning never

occurred
Evelyn Hatchs students, Cindy Stafford and Ginger Covitt,
interviewed one such second language performer, V, an ESL
student at UCLA, who exhibited considerable competence in
English, but who admitted that he had conscious control of
very few, if any, rules.
Interviewer: (When you write a composition) do you think of
grammar rules? Do you think Should I have used the present
tense here or would the present continuous be better
V: I dont refer to the books an all that, you know. I just refer
it to this, uh, my judgment and sensing if Im writing it right
or wrong. Because I really dont know.. What where exactly
how.. The grammatical rules work out.

Learning
that
never
seems
to
become Acquisition
(occurs when the performer has
learned a rule, but has not acquired
it)
P, a fairly typical successful Monitor user was studied by
Krashen and Pon (1975). P was a native speaker of Chinese in
her 40s, who had begun to learn English sometime in her 20s
when she came to the United States.
Krashen and Pon studied Ps casual, everyday language
production. Observers, native speakers of English (usually Ps
son), simply recorded her errors from utterances she
produced in normal family living or in friendly conversational
situations. Immediately after an utterance containing an
error was recorded, it was presented to the subject. The data
was gathered over a 3-week period and about 80 errors were
tabulated.

P thus illustrates the general characteristics of the

successful Monitor user noted above. She is able to
communicate well in both Monitor free and edited
situations, applying the Monitor when it is
appropriate to focus on form. Her performance is
variable, in that she makes some errors in
unmonitored speech, while her written output is
quite close to the native speakers norm. In a
sense, she is able to achieve the illusion of the
native speakers syntactic level of performance bt
efficient, accurate monitoring.

A third reason for doubting that acquisition

required previous learning is the fact that even the
best learners master only a small subset of the
rules of a language.
Explanation:
While learning may often precede acquisition, it
need not, and in fact may not even help directly.
Rather, we acquire along a fairly predictable
natural order, and this occurs when we receive
comprehensible input. Occasionally, we learn
certain rules before we acquire them, and this
gives us the illusion that the learning actually
caused the acquisition.
Language learning, in the general sense, occurred
when one first consciously grasped a rule, then
practiced it again and again until it was
automatic

Case Example:
The first lesson of the session was focused on the present
progressive tense. The objective was to inform the students
that the present progressive had three meanings:
1. A current, on-going action that would soon be completed.
2. An action that began some time ago in the past and may
or may not be taking pace at the moment, and would end
sometime soon in the future
3. Future tense
1. What is that noise from the other room? (John is playing
the violin.)
2. Whats John doing this summer? ( He is playing the violin
for the local symphony.)
3. Whats John doing tomorrow? (Hes playing the violin in the
talent show.)

The Place of
Grammar
Grammar is a term synonymous with
conscious learning. It has 2 possible role in the
second language teaching program. First, it can
be used with some profit as a Monitor. A second
use for grammar is as subject matter, or for
language appreciation (sometimes called
linguistics). Neither role is essential, neither is
the central part of the pedagogical program but
both have functions.

Grammar for Monitor Use:

When the Monitor is used.
The place for Monitor use is when the performer
has time, as in writing and in prepared speech.
The
performer
must
be
thinking
correctness or focused on form.
The performer must know the rule.

about

What can be
monitored.

(a) All the rules of

English

What can be
monitored.
All the rules of
English

Subset of English
described by formal
linguists

What can be
monitored.
All the rules of
English

Formal Linguists
knowledge

Applied Linguists
knowledge

What can be
monitored.
All the rules of
English

Formal Linguists
knowledge

Applied Linguists
knowledge
Best Teachers
knowledge

What can be
monitored.
All the rules of
English
Formal Linguists
knowledge

Applied Linguists
knowledge
Best Teachers
knowledge
Rules taught

What can be
monitored.
Rules actually
learned by the best
students

Rules used in
performance

(a) Incompetent Monitor Use

Seliger (1979) reported a simple, yet interesting
experiment which confirms the existence of Incompetent
Monitor Users.
TASK:
Subjects were shown pictures and asked to say what the
object pictured was in English (e.g. Its a pen.).
SUBJECTS:
29 monolingual English speaking children, ages 3 to 10.8
11 bilingual children, ages 4 to 10
15 adult ESL students at Queens College in New York
Seliger noted whether the subjects applied a/an rule and whether they
correctly used an when the following noun began with a vowel.

(a) Incompetent Monitor Use

INTERPRETATION:
The study contrasts acquisition and learning. The subjects focus in
the picture naming task was on supplying vocabulary. The task,
then, encouraged the use of the acquired system; it was relatively
unmonitored.
RESULTS:
None of the bilingual children produced correct conscious rules
for a/an.
Among the adults, three of the four who knew the rule
produced no instances on the picture test to show they
understood how the rule was to be used.
These subjects, in other words, had learned the a/an distinction but
had not acquired it.

Two children and one adult performed well on the picture

identification test but produced incorrect rules (e.g. You use an
for something thats alive.

The adult who performed perfectly on the test may be classified as

an incompetent Monitor user. This subject has acquired the a/an
rule, but had not learned it correctly.
The subject had failed to learn what most teachers would consider
to be an amazingly simple rule, yet he had apparently acquired it.
This illustrates the independence of acquisition and learning, as well
as just how limited learning can be for some performers.

(b) Rule Learnability

Learnability is related to linguistic simplicity, both
formal and functional. The rules we can learn and carry
around in our heads for use as a Monitor are not those
that are earliest acquired, nor are they those that are
important for communication. Rather, they are the
simple rules, rules that are the easiest to describe and
remember.

(c) Some evidence

(that easy rules are learnable by most people)
1. P, the optimal Monitor user made many errors on such easy items
such as the third person singular ending on regular verbs, the use of
much and many with count and mass nouns, and the irregular
past, among the errors.
2. Both Ue-Lin and Eva, Chinese speaking ESL students as UCLA, had
problems with the late acquired third person singular /s/. Ue-Lin
explained this omission as a careless mistake since she reported
knowing the rule. Similarly, when Eva was shown sentences
containing s deletion, she was able to identify the error and supply
the s immediately. When asked to explain why she omitted the s,
she replied, Probably just careless.

(d) Consequences of teaching hard rules

Felix (1980) shows us what happens when students are asked to
learn rules that are too difficult for them, rules that are not only
difficult to learn but that are also not yet acquired. The students
were asked to use them in unmonitored situations.
SUBJECTS:
EFL class for 10-11 year old students in Germany
OBSERVATIONS:
Teachers taught and demanded correct use of elliptic sentences (as
in exchanges of the type: Is it a dog? Yes, it is.)
Despite the fact that this type of question-answer dialogue was intensively
drilled every day, Felix reports that correct elliptic sentences were only
randomly supplied for a period of almost three months. (i.e. It is a dog? Yes,
it isnt!)

REFERENCE:
Stephen Krashen, Principles and Practices in Second Language Acquisition,
University of Southern California
Stephen Krashen, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Lerning, University of Southern California