Acquisition in the Natural Approach the Binding

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Acquisition in the Natural Approach: The Binding/Access FrameworkAuthor(s): Tracy David TerrellSource: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 213-227Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers

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Acquisition n t h e N a t u r a l Approach:T h e Binding/AccessrameworkTRACY DAVID TERRELL

THE NATURAL APPROACH TO LANGUAGE TEACHINGsuggests the incorporation of two sources ofknowledge of the target language into the teach-ing context.1 Following "second language ac-quisition theory" (henceforth "L2 theory") asformulated by Krashen, the terms "acquisition"and "learning" are used to refer to these twosorts of linguistic knowledge.2 Acquisition isthe process which is said to lead to subconsciousknowledge about language, a "feel"for correct-ness, while the product of learning is said toresult from conscious attention to some part ofthe target language. Accordingly, in a NaturalApproach (NA) class, we attempt to providethe students with opportunities for both sortsof language experiences.Emphasis in NA is given to acquisition. Thisdecision is based on L2 theory. Krashen hy-pothesizes that fluency, specifically the produc-tion of utterances, depends primarily on ac-quired knowledge, while learned knowledge isuseful to a speaker mainly as a "monitor," amental processor which enables the speaker tomake corrections in an utterance before and asit is spoken. According to this view, mostspeech production is based on acquired knowl-edge, since speakers are not able to monitor toany great degree while engaged in normal con-versation. Thus even if some rule of grammaris explained, practiced, and "learned" in a lan-guage class, this knowledge is not readily avail-able to most speakers in normal conversation.Krashen maintains that acquisition takesplace whenever the acquirer interacts with com-prehensible input in the target language.3 Ac-cording to this hypothesis it is not necessary to"program" specific grammar points in a lessonsince, if the acquirer receives enough compre-The Modern LanguageJournal, 70, iii (1986)0026-7902/86/00003/213 $1.50/0?1986 The Modern LanguageJournal

hensible input at the appropriate level, thegrammatical structures and forms will be ac-quired in a "natural" order.The purpose of this paper is to explore L2theory in more detail in the context of languageteaching in a classroom. I will focus on the ac-quisition process, attempting to describe howI view the functions and interaction of acqui-sition and learning for the NA class. Claims inthis paper are not based on empirical datagathered in experimental fashion, but rather onpersonal experiences teaching Spanish withNA, observing others acquire with NA (Span-ish, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Japanese,Mandarin Chinese), and introspection of myown recent experiences in NA Greek classeshere in the US and in Greece. No claims aremade for those who acquire languages in natu-ral acquisition environments, or for studentsusing methodologies other than NA.DEFINITIONS

I take the acquisition of a form of the tar-get language to be the process which leads tothe ability to understand and produce that formcorrectly in a communicative context.4 A "form"may be monomorphemic (tree), polymor-phemic (running), or grammatical (the). I willconsider a form to be acquired only when it canbe both understood and produced. This posi-tion coincides with the "working" definition ofacquisition by second language researchers.5Consequently, I consider first the developmentof listening comprehension skills and then pro-ceed to speaking skills.LISTENING COMPREHENSION

The ability to comprehend utterances in theinput can be examined by looking at two com-ponents: 1) the use of context-dependent strate-gies to determine meaning of unknown formsin the input; 2) the association of meaning with


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214 TracyDavid Terrellthese new forms. These component skills inter-act and depend on each other as the ability tocomprehend grows. Let us first examine theprocess which associates meaning with form.

BINDINGBinding is the term I propose to describe thecognitive and affective mental process of link-ing a meaning to a form. The concept of bind-ing is what language teachers refer to when theyinsist that a new word ultimately be associateddirectly with its meaning and not with a trans-lation.6 In our native language we bind forms

to their meaning so strongly that most of usnever reflect on the fact that meaning and formare linked arbitrarily.The binding of meaning with form clearlyis experiential in the development of our firstlanguage. For example, a child playing in theyard comes across a flower. Mother providesinput such as: "Isn't that a pretty flower? Doyou like the flower?" (Child pulls off the blos-som.) "No, don't pick the flower. We are sup-posed to look at flowers, not pick them." (Childbegins to eat the flower.) "No, don't eat theflower, smell it. Doesn't the flower smell nice?It's a pretty flower, isn't it?"Through such ex-periences, the child uses several senses to de-velop the concept "flower" and to begin thebinding of this concept to the correct form inits native language.The facilitation of binding is a major focusof activities in a beginning NA class. Many ofthe specific NA techniques are explicitly de-signed to create situations and experienceswhich will aid the student in binding meaningto form. I will review three characteristics ofNA which appear to facilitate the binding pro-cess.

Acquisitionin Stages. Past descriptions of NAemphasize that students in a NA class areallowed to proceed through stages of languageacquisition.' Three important stages for be-ginners are posited: comprehension (prepro-duction), early speech (one-word responses),and speech emergence (sentence production).The existence of a "pre-speech" stage gives thestudents an opportunity to concentrate on bind-ing without the added pressures for speech. Inaddition, even when students do start speaking,one-word responses are encouraged in order to

maintain the focus on the comprehension ofinput.ConcreteAssociation.The activities in the firsttwo stages of NA language acquisition alwaysinclude the possibility of making concrete asso-ciation within a meaningful context. The classactivities include Asher's "Total Physical Re-sponse" (association with body movement),input centered on visuals (usually magazinepictures or other realia), and input centered oncharacteristics of the students themselves.8

Speech Techniques.NA instructors draw stu-dents' attention to key words by means ofvarious speech techniques: by pronouncingwords slowly, by varying the tone and volumeof the voice, by reentry, by pointing out aword's referent with each use, and, of course,by liberal use of gestures and other sorts of bodylanguage. In addition, the focus during all ac-tivities is on the meaning of the utterances inthe input.Students in NA classes have reported variousstrategies for associating meaning with form.For example, in a demonstration lesson ofGreek, I introduced the word paputsia (shoes)pointing to my own and then later to picturesof shoes.9 The participants later reported avariety of association techniques. A few lookedat the referent and attempted to link the newform directly. Others reported using the wordpapoos as an association. Still others used theother languages they knew: Spanish pantuflasand French pantouffles (slippers). Frequentlystudents report that at first they recognize somewords only by the initial syllable, or even bythe initial consonant. Sometimes the length ofthe word helps. In a TPR activity, some stu-dents reported distinguishing the commandperpatiste (walk) from trekste(run) simply bylength plus the initial consonant. Thus it ap-pears that binding takes place in stages for moststudents. At first, a new form is recognized as"something familiar," but the meaning (or moreaccurately, meanings) may not be recalled.Later meaning is slowly recognized. Eventuallythe form is recognized and interpreted withinthe phonological stream. Binding is completewhen the form evokes the meaning withoutdelay and the form finally "sounds like what itmeans."

The binding of form to meaning is notequivalent to listening comprehension, butrather is a building block of it. Listening com-


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 215prehension includes other, more complex, pro-cesses such as the interpretation of the relation-ships between elements in an utterance. Thus,in Stage One (Comprehension) the goals of NAinclude not only the facilitation of the bindingof key forms in the input to meaning but alsothe development of basic comprehension strate-gies including "contextual guessing." The fol-lowing is a translation of typical input in oneof my early Greek lessons (students' responsesare in parentheses).'0Look at this picture. What do we see? A woman?(Yes.) Yes, that's right, there is a woman in thepicture. What is this? (Students shakeheads.) Thisis a hat. The woman is wearing a hat. This pictureof the woman who is wearing the hat is forYvonne.Ok? Now who has the picture of the woman whois wearing the hat? (Yvonne.)11We understood key elements of the input bymatching the parts of the input correspondingto the concepts represented by the Englishwords - look,picture,woman, hat, and who- withthe help of contextual cues for meaning. In thisway students are encouraged to develop a sortof "strategic competence," interpreting theGreek corresponding to Who has thepictureof thewomanwearinga hat? by focusing on the targetlanguage forms for who, woman, hat, and thecommunicative context.

SPEECHThe production of an utterance in the tar-get language also involves at least two compo-nents: the ability to express a particular mean-ing with a particular form and the ability to

string forms together in appropriate ways. Theformer I call access, the latter involves produc-tion strategies.Access.The term I use to refer to the produc-tion of an appropriate form to express a spe-cific meaning in an utterance is access.12 Be-ginning students create utterances by access-ing forms and then stringing them together inutterances.'3 Access does not follow automati-cally from binding. Even when a form has beenbound to a meaning and is recognized immedi-ately in the input, students do not necessarilyproduce it automatically and easily.Facility in access may be controlled by sev-eral factors. One factor is the strength of thebinding process, itself controlled by several fac-

tors (such as salience and frequency) in theinput. If the form to be accessed is not stronglybound (for whatever reason, perhaps low fre-quency in the input), then access will be diffi-cult. Phonological complexity doubtless playsa role. If the form is long and contains severalsounds radically different from those in thenative language, the word will be difficult toproduce even if it is strongly bound to its mean-ing. For example, I recognize the meaning ofthe word anapsitikd soft drink) immediately ifit is used by others, but I have difficulty pro-ducing it, perhaps, because of length and stresspatterns. It is reasonable to assume that facilityin access is also related to frequency of oppor-tunities to access a specific form in a meaning-ful context. This assumption is, in part, a re-statement of the traditional idea that meaning-ful practice in speaking leads to increasedfluency.In order to test my hypothesis (that speed ofaccess is related to opportunities to access a spe-cific form), we carried out an experiment withstudents of German as a foreign language. 14Agroup of third-quarter elementary German stu-dents at the University of California, SanDiego, participated in a TPR (Total PhysicalResponse) activity in which the instructormodeled commands such as Husten Sie (cough),PfeifenSie (whistle), KlatschenSie einmaldieHiinde(clap your hands once). In the first session stu-dents listened only and carried out the instruc-tions. In the second session, half of the studentsgave the commands to the entire group. Thus,one-half of the group listened only, while theother half was required to access and vocalizethe forms. Later each student was tested indi-vidually on his/her ability to access these forms.As predicted by Krashen's input hypothesis,access itself was not a problem: all of the stu-dents in both groups were able to access mostof the forms. However, speed of access was dif-ferent. The students who actually gave thecommands had consistently shorter access timesthan those who had never meaningfully vocal-ized the commands. The average time requiredfor recall for the silent group was 2.23 seconds,while for the speaking group it was 1.68 sec-onds. The conclusion is that meaningful com-munication experiences in which students aregiven the opportunity to produce forms whichhave been (or are in the process of being)bound, should result in increased fluency.


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216 TracyDavid TerrellThree methodological characteristics of NAaid in the development of access skills: 1) acqui-sition in stages; 2) reduced response activities;3) expansion of short responses.Acquisition n Stages.As with binding, the de-velopment of good access skills is aided by thefact that NA students have different sorts of de-

mands put on them in the early stages of lan-guage acquisition. In the comprehension stage,access is not demanded at all since all effortsare directed toward binding a large number ofwords. As binding develops, however, the in-structor begins to provide opportunities withinthe input for single word responses from thestudents. The responses always consist of aform which has been bound. There are four im-portant eliciting techniques: 1) yes-no ques-tions- Is therea dog in this picture?2) either-orquestions-Is this a dog or a cat? 3) Wh-ques-tions - What (Where, When, Who) is this? 4)Open-ended statements - Thedogis in the . . . .

Reduced-ResponseActivities. Certain sorts ofcommunicative activities require only reducedresponses from the students. Three used fre-quently in NA are: 1) open dialogs; 2) inter-views; and 3) information searching.'5

Expansion of ShortResponses. NA instructorsexpand student responses to provide for com-prehensible input. For example, in the inter-change: Is thedogeating? (No.) What'she doing?(Running.) Yes,he'srunning. Wheres herunning?(Park.) Yes,he'srunningin a park-the studentwas asked to access the items runningand parkbut not he's, since presumably the former, butnot the latter, had been bound in previous ac-tivities. At the same time the exchange allowsfor the opportunity to access running, t also pro-vides an opportunity to enhance the bindingof he's (and perhaps the, in, and a).Access is not equivalent to speech produc-tion. Rather, as in the case of binding, it is abuilding block of production which ultimatelyinvolves other skills such as the generation ofutterances using the syntax of the target lan-guage as a frame for the forms which have beenaccessed. Unfortunately, we know little aboutthe sort of speech production strategies used bystudents in NA classes.

The binding and access of forms, as a sum-mary to this point, are seen as basic processesof both listening and speaking skills - the goalsof an NA class. It follows, then, that for acqui-sition to take place, two conditions are neces-

sary: 1) comprehensible input which results inbinding; 2) opportunities to access these boundforms to express ideas in meaningful contexts.The binding of meaning to monomorphemicforms such as uninflected nouns, verbs, andadjectives, is relatively simple, both in theoryand in classroom practice. The binding ofmeaning to grammatically complex words andto the grammatical morphemes themselves issomewhat complicated. Individual studentsprobably vary somewhat in their binding andaccess of words that contain grammatical mor-phemes. The following remarks are, therefore,unavoidably speculative and are based againon personal experiences in NA classes.

BINDING GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMESMorphemes which do not undergo complex

allomorphy and which refer to a relativelysimple semantic concept are most easilybound. 16EFL and ESL instructors universallyreport that the progressive -ing, when referringto ongoing action, is quickly bound by their stu-dents. The Spanish preposition de (of), whichindicates possession, is bound quickly andeasily by most English-speaking students. How-ever, as any ESL teacher affirms, the Englishverb marker -s seems particularly resistant tobinding (and access). Perhaps this resistance isbecause the verb morpheme -s signals no realmeaning, but, rather, marks a co-occurrencerestriction with singular NP subjects. This sec-tion describes the binding process of grammati-cal morphemes in NA classes using as examplesplural markers on nouns and person-numberendings on verbs. It draws on my experienceteaching Spanish to English speakers in theUnited States and on that as a student in anNA Greek class.Plural. Spanish plural nouns are bound veryquickly by English-speaking students doubtlessbecause the plural marker -(e)s also signalsplurality in English. After only two or three ex-amples in the input, mesa/mesas table/tables),drbol/drbolestree/trees), students react to formsending in -(e)s as plural.The plural morpheme on noun modifiers isnot bound as quickly although it is formallyidentical to the plural marker on nouns. Ad-jectives, for example, grande/grandesbig/big-PL)appear to be processed by attending to the stemfor meaning and ignoring the ending. The


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 217obvious explanation is that speakers of Englishhave nothing in their language which wouldcause them to focus on adjectives as a signalof plurality. Thus the concept "big-PL" is newand it takes some time to bind the form grandesto the meaning "b i g-PL," that is, for the wordgrandes to "sound" plural. However, withenough instances of plural adjectives in theinput, both forms, grandeand grandes,are even-tually bound and interpreted correctly.Plural forms in Greek are more difficult thanSpanish to bind because several subclasses ofnouns are pluralized with different morphemes.In my own acquisition of Greek, I bound wordsas either singular or plural according to the con-text in which I first heard them. Thus paptitsia(shoes) was heard as plural and bound as suchwithout knowing exactly what part of the wordsignaled plurality; this word was never heardin its singular form. Other words were boundas singular without a corresponding pluralform: kefdli head), pdrta door), taksl'(taxi). Stillothers were heard in the input in both forms:aftokinito (automobile) and aftokinita (auto-mobiles), yinika (woman) andyindkes (women).These double forms were also bound as sepa-rate lexical items. However, as my experiencewith Greek input increased, numerous pluralwords appeared which ended in -es or -a. Thusin addition to binding each separate form with-a or -es, the morphemes themselves were even-tually bound to the notion of plurality. Andafter they were bound, I was able to recognizethem as signaling plurality on new words in theinput. I have not completed the acquisition ofthe rule(s) in Greek for plurality, however,since I have not yet bound enough forms tohave "figured out" the restrictions on the dis-tribution of each allomorph. I also cannotaccess and produce all of the plural forms thatI can understand. In addition I have bound afew other forms which are plural and which donot use these plural markers: prdovlima/provli'mata(problem, problems). Presumably more inputwill result in the acquisition of a generalizationconcerning these plural forms also.Person-NumberVerbMorphemes.Beginning NASpanish students report that at first they do nothear or notice person-number affixes on verbs.Thus hablo (I speak) and habla (he/she/youspeak(s)) are at first simply variants interpretedas "speak."However, in certain "association"ac-tivities, forms such as hablo(I speak) and habla

(speaks), como(I eat), and come(eats) are fre-quent in the input and bound relatively soon."7As the number of forms for a single personnumber are bound, say first person singular,the morpheme itself becomes increasinglysalient. Students who have bound verb formssuch as hablo, como, llego, salgo, pongo, vivo,estudio,practico,uego, duermo(I + verb meaning)subsequently bind the morpheme -o to "I."Thisbinding is evidenced by the fact that they cancorrectly understand new first person singularforms encountered in the input. Students reportthat the binding of -o to "first person singular"is fairly rapid, and is quickly followed by thebinding of -mos to "first person plural." Thebinding of -s to "second person familiar singu-lar" takes somewhat longer as does the bindingof -n to "third person plural."Anecdotal evidence suggests that the bindingof grammatical morphemes is similar to thatof full lexical items. My hypothesis is that inboth cases students begin by binding a com-plete word to a meaning. Subsequently thegrammatical marker becomes salient as a num-ber of words with the same marker are bound.This leads to the possibility of binding themorpheme itself to the appropriate meaningand to the ability to understand new formswhich carry the morpheme.

BINDING GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES:NA TECHNIQUES

L2 theory predicts accurately that, for natu-ral acquirers, grammatical morphemes will beacquired as expected (in a natural order) pro-vided that enough comprehensible input isavailable. For example, NA instructors in pri-mary school ESL, immersion, or bilingual pro-grams do not usually program the inclusion ofspecific grammatical morphemes in theirspeech; this task would not be easy even if theyattempted to control their input to such adegree. The situation is different in NA foreignlanguage classes for adolescents or adults.Four potential problems exist: 1) time; 2)lack of saliency; 3) redundancy; and 4) the pos-sibility of comprehension without use of gram-matical morphemes. First, the number of in-structional hours in a typical elementary col-lege foreign language course ranges fromseventy-five to 150. Given random input forthese 100 or so hours, it is not clear that most


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218 TracyDavid Terrellgrammatical morphemes would reappear in theinput enough to permit complete binding. Evenworse, the opportunities to access these mor-phemes in meaningful contexts are quitelimited, especially in classes with more than fif-teen or so students. Second, grammatical mor-phemes are often not salient. Typically, gram-matical morphemes are not stressed and theyare not in salient positions in sentences. Theyare also usually redundant, especially when dis-course and contextual information is taken intoconsideration. Finally, students can use globallistening strategies, which avoid attending atall to grammatical markers, and still under-stand most of the input.

In order to minimize the negative impact ofthese factors, in certain NA activities we try tomake maximal use of important grammaticalmorphemes. Examples of these teaching tech-niques are given below for verbal person-num-ber morphemes in Spanish and Greek.Spanish verb forms can give rise to multipleand complex contrastive patterns; in additionto person-number forms, one must bind tense,aspect, and mood morphemes to their mean-ings. It is not realistic to think that students willbind (and later skillfully access) the forty or soforms of each Spanish verb simply from listen-ing to random input for the one hundred or sohours of a typical elementary Spanish course.On the other hand, the memorization of verbparadigms most certainly guarantees neitherbinding nor access.NA activities use a two-step approach in-tended to create optimal conditions for thebinding of verb suffixes. The first step consistsof giving input which allows binding meaningto a number of words containing the same mor-pheme. Assume the topic of the input in a be-ginning Spanish class to be "daily activities ofthe instructor." The teacher describes his/herdaily routine and the students understandforms like melevanto(I get up), mebaifo(I bathe),desayuno I eat breakfast), trabajo I work), etc.The fist step is the binding of meaning to thepolymorphemic form, i.e., the students bindthe meaning which includes "I"to the entireform. This task is relatively simple since first-person singular forms are concentrated in theinput because of the particular topic chosen("What I do each day"). As the number of formsincluding this same morpheme increases, steptwo is carried out: the forms are "analyzed,"and

the -o itself is bound to "I"(or using grammati-cal terminology to "first-personsingular presenttense"). Once the morpheme -o is bound, it maybe understood (and subsequently produced) onnovel forms in the input.Another example helps clarify this two-stepprocess for the binding of a grammatical mor-pheme. In Greek I bound the following verbforms to their meaning: mildte you speak), dxete(you have), pinete(you drink), and so forth. Inother words, the verb forms I heard and under-stood in the classroom input were processedand stored as words rather than as forms con-sisting of a stem and a grammatical morpheme.(This had to be the case since additional gram-matical information was not available to helpme analyze these forms.) However, as an in-creasing number of these forms with similaraffixes are stored, the binding of -teas a mean-ingful unit begins. Suppose now that I havebound a form like fordi (he/she wears). LaterI hear a form fordite you wear) and recognizethat it refers to "you." Given enough of theseopportunities to interpret new forms with -te,I will be able to complete the binding of themorpheme -te to its meaning "second person."

My hypothesis concerning the binding ofmeaning to grammatical morphemes is thatcomplex items are first processed by studentsin an NA class as simple words. Then, as thenumber of words containing the same gram-matical morpheme increases, they are able toattach meaning to the morpheme itself. Theteaching approach of NA is to give opportuni-ties to hear the same suffix used repeatedly ina communicative context in which meaningscan be clearly and easily associated with thestem and the suffix.18

ACCESS OF GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMESLet us now consider forms containing gram-matical morphemes from the point of view oftheir access.'19Apparently at first NA studentsassign a general meaning to several forms. Forexample, tengo(is) and tiene(3s) are bound to"have"with no person-number association. Thisincomplete binding is possible since, in mostutterances, even in cases of subject deletion in

Spanish, the subject of the sentence is well de-fined by context. However, when access is re-quired of forms for which binding is not com-plete, students produce utterances like *yotiene


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 219tarea(*I has work) as well as the correctyo tengotarea. In addition, it appears that these kindsof agreement errors persist even after the per-son-number affixes are bound-that is, afterstudents consistently recognize the meaning oftengo(I have) and tiene(has). The persistenceof these sorts of morphological errors supportsthe notion that access does not automaticallyfollow from binding.A complicating factor is the existence ofgrammatical agreement. The task of the stu-dent is not just to recognize and produce singu-lar and plural verb forms which correspond tothe meaning they want to express, but to accessthem attending to co-occurrence restrictions,i.e., hablan(speak-pl) if the subject is Juan andCarmen. The final stages of the acquisition ofthe rule of person-number agreement in suchcases may be seen as the sorting out of theaccess of correct forms at the same time. 20Pre-sumably as the students process input, thebinding of grammatically complex forms be-comes increasingly precise. Then with experi-ence in producing forms in meaningful con-texts, the access of correct forms is both fasterand more correct.PROMOTING CORRECT LEXICAL ACCESSIN NA CLASSES

As in the case of binding, in order to fostercorrect access we attempt to create situationsin which certain morphemes are concentratedin an activity in a single meaning-form rela-tionship.21 In an interview activity, for ex-ample, the student might be asked a series ofquestions like: Wheredidyou go? Whodidyou see?Whatdidyou do?Didyou eat? Wheredidyou work?The answer to all of these questions can involvea verb form in the first-person singular of thepast tense. Students report that communicativeexperiences in which they are given opportuni-ties to access many forms with the same form-function relationship facilitates the access pro-cess itself.22SUMMARY

To this point we have attempted to examinethe acquisition process in NA class activities.We have looked at listening comprehension andspeech production, and at certain componentsof these skills: binding, access, listening strate-gies, and production strategies. I have sug-gested that characteristics of NA, especially the

notion of the acquisition of speech in naturalstages, and certain instructional techniqueswhich provide naturally for the concentrationof grammatical morphemes in communicativeactivities, are aimed specifically at developingbinding and access-i.e., the basic buildingblocks of acquisition.L2 THEORY: THE INSTRUCTOR'S VIEW

Krashen's L2 acquisition theory is based pri-marily on research which looks at language ac-quisition in natural environments (accom-panied or not by classroom instruction). How-ever, certain problematic areas exist in L2 ac-quisition theory when applied to classroom in-struction- especially to foreign language in-struction. I will examine four of them and ineach case show how Krashen's acquisitionframework, which includes the concepts ofbinding and access as proposed here, resolvesthese problems.

Vocabulary.L2 researchers often talk about"the acquisition of a second language," but "ac-quisition" in L2 research and theory has beenapplied mostly to morphology, syntax, andsometimes phonology. Indeed, most of the re-search Krashen cites to support L2 theory con-sists of the studies which focus on the acquisi-tion of particular morphemes such as English-ing, verbal -s, plural -s, the copula, and soforth. Some syntactic studies of areas such assentence negation and relative clause formationdo exist.23 Increasing attention is currentlybeing paid to the acquisition of discourse skills.On the other hand almost no work has beendone on the acquisition of simple monomor-phemic words. This lack of focus on the acqui-sition of simple vocabulary items is somewhatpeculiar from the point of view of the instruc-tor of an elementary L2 class. And, of course,from the point of view of the beginning studentstrying to communicate with a native speakerof the target language, the most important com-ponent of that language is its lexicon. In thediscussion to this point, I have hypothesizedthat the concepts of binding and access, henceacquisition, are applicable both to monomor-phemic lexical items and to grammatical mor-phemes. Indeed, most of the activities in thefirst two stages in an NA class are designed spe-cifically to focus on the binding and access ofkey nouns, verbs, and adjectives.Speechin the NA Class. L2 researchers nor-


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220 TracyDavid Terrellmally measure acquisition by some criterion ofproduction. We say, for example, that speakershave acquired the -ing morpheme when theyproduce it in ordinary speech at or above, say,a ninety percent accuracy level in obligatoryoccasions.24 Krashen's Input Hypothesisclaimsthat acquisition results from understandingmessages. Theoretically, one could make theclaim that acquisition takes place without anyspeech production. Such a claim would haveno practical implications since the principalsource of comprehensible input must be oralinteraction with speakers of the target lan-guage. Native speakers are not usually knownto pursue conversation with those who do notor cannot respond. Within the binding-accessframework proposed here, acquisition is de-fined as both the ability to comprehend and toproduce meaningful utterances in the targetlanguage. By definition then, acquisition is com-plete only when the student can both compre-hend and produce the target language. It fol-lows that comprehensible input is the primarysource for acquisition, since comprehensibleinput provides both the opportunities and thedata for the binding process and the develop-ment of listening comprehension strategies.However, although acquisition begins withcomprehensible input, students must haveopportunities to access and produce linguisticelements which have been bound. Within thebinding-access framework, this amounts to theclaim that the student must have real two-wayconversational experiences for complete acqui-sition to take place.25Since the focus of L2 theory and of the firsttwo stages of NA is on comprehensible input,teachers frequently ask about the role of speechin acquisition. Within the binding-accessframework this question becomes more precise:what role does access play in binding? Weassume that increased opportunities for access-ing bound forms will, of course, lead to moreskill in access. However, a different questionremains: does forcing the student to accesswords which have not yet been bound, espe-cially words containing grammatical suffixes,help to bind those elements? It should be notedthat this position is precisely that of the "cog-nitive" approach in which language lessons areorganized in the following way: 1) explain; 2)practice; and 3) apply. And, in fact, most textsassume that binding is aided by access since

almost all exercises are designed to force thestudents to produce forms they have had littleor no opportunity to bind. However, the effectof forced production of unbound forms on thebinding process itself remains an open ques-tion. Certainly non-meaningful productionwould not have any effect on binding. On theother hand, the production of unbound itemsin a meaningful context by one student mightserve as comprehensible input to other studentsand aid the latter in the binding process. How-ever, it is not clear that the mechanical produc-tion of unbound forms, the goal of most gram-matical exercises, has more than a minimaleffect on binding for the student who producesthem.Because of our skepticism regarding thevalue of production of unbound forms, NA ac-tivities are designed to give the students oppor-tunities to bind forms before being asked toaccess and produce them. In any natural inter-change, however, students inevitably try to ex-ceed their range of competence and attempt toaccess and produce words not yet bound. Thisattempt is, in part, necessary in order to de-velop strategic competence. Thus some accessof unbound forms will be found in any NA classactivity. However, if one adheres to the prin-ciple of "stages"of acquisition described above,most language the students will be asked to pro-duce will have been bound and the occasionalaccess of unbound forms probably does noharm. In any case comprehensible input, notthe production of unbound forms, is the prin-cipal vehicle for binding. And indeed forcedproduction of forms which have not yet beenbound results in numerous errors and perhapsis a contributing factor to the fossilization ofinaccurate forms. The remedy for fossilizationprescribed by most proponents of "cognitive"approaches is error correction. Unfortunately,whatever the benefits of error correction dur-ing mechanical drills, direct and "interruptive"error correction of grammatical details duringmeaningful communication clearly disrupts theacquisition process.Conscious and Subconscious Knowledge. InKrashen's L2 theory (and in the version of theNA presented in Krashen and Terrell's TheNatural Approach,note 1 below) acquisition isa subconscious process and occurs only wheninput is comprehended within a communica-tive context. Learning is a conscious process.


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 221While merely terms, conscious and subcon-scious may be useful for explaining second-lan-guage acquisition in a natural environment;they are definitely problematic for the class-room L2 instructor.26 Basing a definition of ac-quisition on this contrast has caused many in-structors to reject L2 theory on the basis thatthe terms "conscious" and "subconscious" aredifficult, if not impossible, to work with. Stu-dents normally pay conscious attention to lan-guage during classroom instruction. If the in-structor emphasizes acquisition, L2 acquisitiontheory has it that one is forced to presume muchof the instruction will be directed toward some-thing happening subconsciously in the mindsof the students; that is not a comfortable stancefor most instructors. In addition, many teachersresist the idea that students should not be ex-plicitly encouraged to pay attention to the pro-duction of "correct"target language. L2 theoryrecommends focus only on the message, not ongrammar, but while this is presumably thenorm in natural acquisition contexts, it is oftendifficult to achieve in the foreign language class-room.

Higgs asserts that the problem stems froma failure to distinguish the process of acquisi-tion from its product.27 Within the binding-access framework proposed here this problemis resolved: the product, i.e., acquired lan-guage, is available for subconscious automaticproduction. However, this availability does notimply that the process of acquisition by adultsin a classroom must take place entirely on asubconscious level. Students in NA classesclaim that indeed much of the acquisition pro-cess appears to take place on a conscious level.To see the merit of this claim, let us return tothe concepts of binding and access. I will againuse examples first of monomorphemic wordsand then grammatical morphemes.In the previous discussion I imply that itemsof major lexical categories may be bound con-sciously; that is, many students may attendconsciously to the association of target languageforms with their meanings. I even suggest vari-ous conscious strategies that students use forthe binding process. This conscious bindingcertainly applies to the core denotative mean-ing of an item. If, in a classroom during an EFLlesson, I point to a table and say to a studentThis is a table, most language students make aconscious effort to bind the form they hear with

the concept "table." This is also true for adultsin natural acquisition situations. One eveningin a Greek taverna,I asked the person sittingnext to me what kind of work he did. Theanswer, stratiotis, meant nothing to me. How-ever, explanation and gestures led me to theconcept (soldier) and even to the place of work(Santorini). My efforts to link stratiotisand con-cept "soldier"were indeed quite conscious anddeliberate.

As the students' competence advances, bind-ing becomes more precise; other informationabout the word, its range, its connotations, isbound either consciously or subconsciously. Forexample, some students consciously note thatSpanish esquinarefers only to an exterior cornersuch as on a street, while rincdnrefers only toan interior one such as the corner of a room.Other students bind this distinction subcon-sciously, recognize the meaning, and access thetwo forms correctly without thinking explicitlyof the distinction.

Conscious attention also plays a role in NAactivities designed for the binding of gram-matical morphemes. For example, the Spanishplural marker -(e)s is used by English-speakingstudents for interpreting utterances, and thisknowledge is usually available for conscious in-trospection. What varies among adults is thelevel of grammatical sophistication (metalan-guage) available to discuss their knowledge.My claim is that in an NA class various levelsof conscious attention may be present duringthe binding process itself. Indeed, one could de-fine binding as a mixture of conscious and/orsubconscious attempts at connecting a formwith meaning by attending both to the mean-ing and context of the utterance in which theform is heard. Keep in mind, however, thatconscious attention to forms does not imply anyparticular level of grammatical sophistication.Such conscious attention is also not a prerequi-site for the binding of grammatical mor-phemes.28 My rejection of the conscious/sub-conscious distinction does not support the so-called "communication drills"in which studentsare forced to attend to creative communicationand monitor grammatical forms at the sametime.What about access and the conscious/sub-conscious distinction? Within a binding-accessframework we may view the production ofutterances as the accessing and arrangement of


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222 TracyDavid Terrellforms using (morpho-)syntactic rules. Adultlearners in an NA class report that access fre-quently, but not always, involves consciousmental "searching" for a form to express a par-ticular meaning. This claim seems especiallyto hold true with beginning students. And, ifaccess of a particular item has not occurredoften, that item will often be "hard" to access.In early speech, many students report that mostaccess and production of single word responsesis done consciously. Such was my case in allencounters with native speakers in Greece: onlyafter multiple opportunities to access a givenword in a communicative context was I ableto do so without conscious attention. Of course,to say that early access may be either consciousor subconscious does not imply that studentsare focussed only on grammar, but rather thatthey are focussed on accessing a form to expressa desired meaning. If the access is for formswhich have been bound, the process is easier.The more experience accessing a particularform in communicative contexts, the morefluent the speech, and the more subconsciousthe accessing of particular forms becomes.Monitoringin NA. Using the binding-accesswe may now redefine Monitoring without rely-ing on the conscious-subconscious distinction.Krashen defines monitoring as the use of"learned" knowledge to edit our production.Presumably, then, the use of any knowledgewhich had been obtained with the aid of con-scious attention would be termed monitoring.Within the context of the classroom, this defi-nition of monitor use is clearly too broad. Usingthe binding-access framework it is not neces-sary to use the conscious/subconscious distinc-tion and we may define monitoring as theaccess of forms learned (studied, memorized),but not yet bound. Thus, monitoring s the useof aform whichoneknows to be correct ia studyandexercises,but which has notyet been "experienced"enough o "soundike"what it means.For example,a student of Spanish may answer the question,cQudpasd anoche?(What happened last night?)by beginning with mis amigos (my friends) . . .and they pausing, trying to generate the third-person plural form of the past tense of venir(come). Although various forms of venir mayhave been bound, venir (to come), vengo (Icome), and viene (comes), and perhaps a fewothers of the forty or so possible forms, thethird-person plural past vinieronmay have not

been present in the input or for whatever rea-son it may not have been salient enough to havebeen bound. After some thought, the incorrect*venieronmay be created if the student remem-bers the endings which have been memorized,or the correct vinieron, f he/she also remembersto make the correct stem vowel change in thisform. Finally the student produces Mis amigosvinieron visitarme(My friends came to visit me).Thus the student falls back on the rules whichhe/she has learned and creates the form. Theresult is a correct utterance, but vinieronstilldoes not "sound" like "they came"; rather, thestudent knows consciously that this form means"they came" to a native speaker of Spanish.

One of the reasons monitoring is so difficultis that the speaker has no way to judge outputexcept consciously by rule. Since the formshave not yet been bound, they do not neces-sarily "feel"correct. The view of monitoring asthe accessing of unbound forms also predictsthat the students may generate forms theywould not necessarily even understand in acommunicative context. This happened fre-quently to me in Greece. I would carefullymemorize a word from my "Greek for tourists"book and even produce it successfully on occa-sion. However, when the same word was usedlater by natives, I often would not recognize it.

Monitoring defined without appealing to theconscious/subconscious distinction is nowclearly separate from the notion of "attending"to speech. I have assumed that binding occurswhen the students attend to the elements of theinput, i.e., that they actively try to associatemeaning and form and subsequently, in theirproduction, try to make the elements in theiroutput match as closely as possible the input.My claim is that whether this "attention"is pri-marily conscious and/or subconscious is essen-tially irrelevant.29As long as meaning and formare associated experientially, acquisition is tak-ing place.In general we would prefer that our studentsuse their acquired system while speaking. Theywould thus comprehend enough bound formsin the utterance to follow the message; in theirspeech they would access forms they boundthrough input. However, in certain cases, agrammatical morpheme may be particularly re-sistant to binding (English verbal -s, for ex-ample) or the system itself may consist of somany forms that it is difficult to hear each often


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 223enough to bind the meaning of a particular one.In these instances, the students who wish to ex-press themselves using forms not yet completelybound have the choice of either making errorsor monitoring to improve correctness. The verbaffix system of Romance languages is notori-ously difficult to bind since thirty to fifty formsexist for each verb. Each of several thousandcommon verb forms must be repeatedly heardin a meaningful context to be completelybound. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to expectthat complete binding of these forms takes sev-eral years of high quality input. In these cases,it is not unreasonable to expect students tomonitor their speech to improve grammaticalaccuracy. Indeed, in The NaturalApproach note1 below), we suggest that the goal of an NAclass is to produce "optimal"monitors, low-levelmonitoring which improves accuracy but doesnot interfere with communication.RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEARNING ANDACQUISITION IN THE CLASSROOM

Various researchers have discussed the rela-tionship between acquisition and learning.30Many, including Brown and Bialystok, for ex-ample, propose that learning and acquisitionare the ends of a single continuum. Still otherssuch as Sharwood-Smith hypothesize thatlearning aids acquisition.31 Krashen rejects theproposition that learning becomes acquisition,while noting the possibility that somethinglearned may later be acquired.32I have no evidence to clarify claims andcounterclaims for natural second language ac-quisition. However, in the context of NA, thequestion is easy to answer: learning in somecases aids acquisition and, in others, impedesit. Let us look at examples of each.Most students in an NA class agree thatsome learning via mechanical drills aids the ac-quisition process. Learning of grammaticalforms and new words might aid acquisition intwo ways. First, learning focusses attention ona new element so that, when it appears in theinput, it might be recognized and, therefore,salient. For example, it appears to be helpfulto students of Spanish and French to discussexplicitly the concept of subject-verb agree-ment. Such a discussion might be profitably fol-lowed up by an exercise to verify comprehen-sion of the concept. The explanation and exer-cise are aimed at learning. Learning is not ac-

quisition, and it does not becomeacquisitionwithout the necessary comprehensible input.However, just the fact that the students under-stand that verb forms may vary according totheir subjects may speed up binding and accessof these forms during subsequent acquisitionactivities. The claim then is not that learningbecomes acquisition, since binding is still con-ditional based on comprehensible input, butrather that such knowledge may aid in mak-ing the forms to be bound and accessed moresalient in the input itself.Second, explicit study and learning of newforms could aid in the inference of global mean-ing from utterances containing a large numberof unbound elements. This sort of learnedknowledge would seem to aid the acquisitionprocess in a general way even if it does notnecessarily affect the particular items beingstudied. Suppose, for example, I learn thatGreek yethira is equivalent to bridge. I mayrepeat the word aloud several times or con-sciously try to associate something with it tohelp retention. If asked for the Greek equiva-lent for bridge,I can produceyethira in the sameway that tourists often memorize and producephrases such as How muchdoes t cost?However,yethira is not yet bound to the concept repre-sented by English bridge,I simply "know" (ab-stractly, theoretically) that it refers to bridge.Tobind the concept to the Greek word I still needto hear yethira used in a meaningful context.Suppose the instructor now tells a story inwhichyethira is used several times. Since I havepreviously learned the meaning of yethira, theword is salient for me and I will doubtless con-sciously recognize it when said. And, if Ivisualize a bridge in the context of a story, itis likely that I will be able to bind the meaningto the word: the formyethirawill begin to "soundlike" its meaning.This sort of "prelearning" of vocabulary mayindeed aid acquisition, but it is not very effi-cient. It is notoriously difficult to bind mean-ing to form when both are associated arbitrarilyin a "vocabulary list"or a mechanical drill. Per-haps such learning affects only short-termmemory. On the other hand, it is relativelysimple to bind meaning to form when both areused in communicative contexts. As I notedabove, the only possible advantage to prelearn-ing is that it may in some cases speed up thebinding process by making the new forms


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224 TracyDavid Terrellsalient in the input. In NA we do not dependmuch on prelearning; we prefer rather to intro-duce all new items in a communicative contextfirst. However, individual learning styles varygreatly and some students report "readingahead" in the text in order to preview newmaterial.Conscious review of new words and gram-matical forms heard only a few times in theinput may also speed up the binding process.In one class period, my Greek instructorshowed a picture of a bay with a bridge at oneend. New words introduced in the input in-cluded the Greek equivalents of bridge, bay,ships, clouds,water, buildings,and highway. Eachof these words was used several times, and heasked questions like: Is therea bridge n thispic-ture? Whereare theships? How manyships doyousee? Whatcolorare the clouds?Naturally the bind-ing of each new word was not completed in asingle class activity. The next day I reviewedthe new words introduced in the previous classperiod, pronouncing each while trying tovisualize its referent. The instructor had givengood comprehensible input at the correct level.I engaged in conscious study consisting of areview of the new words outside of class. I can-not, of course, prove that the review helpedspeed up binding. However, I am convincedthat at least for me, consciousstudy during myreview of these words made them more salient;and during the following classes, when thesewords were again used in a meaningful con-text, my recognition of their meaning was quickand easy.One could argue correctly that the learningpractice was unnecessary - with enough inputthe words would have been acquired in anycase. While this assertion is probably true (andis most likely the normal way second-languageacquirers in natural situations gain newvocabulary), sufficient class time does not existfor the necessary amount of reentry of each newword; materials which could supply compre-hensible input outside of class are not readilyavailable. Learning in the form of moderateamounts of (pre- and) post-study may speed upthe binding of lexical items in situations inwhich there would not be enough time or op-portunity for the necessary reentry in com-prehensible input.33The (pre- and) post-study of grammaticalmorphemes (and their associated rules of dis-

tribution and co-occurrence) may also speed uptheir acquisition. In Spanish and French thenonstressed natural and preverbal placementof the clitic pronouns make their acquisitionquite problematic; most students report that,at first, they do not even hear them and simplyinfer their presence by context. It does not seemunreasonable that an explanation of their formand placement followed by short exercises toverify comprehension of the explanation wouldbe helpful in making these forms more salientand thereby more understandable in the input.However, the study of grammar is moreproblematic than is the learning of simple vo-cabulary. In order for the study of grammarto be effective, one would want to study a par-ticular morpheme at the beginning of the bind-ing process. Unfortunately, it is not alwaysclear exactly when binding begins. If grammaris studied too soon, this knowledge may indeedinterfere with comprehension of utterances andthereby retard the binding process.During the first hour of my Greek instruc-tion, the instructor used visuals, made state-ments about the content of pictures, and thenasked yes/no questions to verify comprehen-sion. To answer I simply had to shake my headyes or no. I recall a picture of a woman cross-ing a street. The instructor stressed the words

yineka (woman), forema (dress), and ble(blue) inthe input as the key lexical items to be boundin order to comprehend the input. The ques-tions to verify comprehension were relativelysimple, my task mostly being to recognize thesethree phonological shapes among the "noise":Is this a woman?Is this a dress?Is the dress blue?One must keep in mind I did not (nor couldI) attend to the forms corresponding to Englishis, this, or the, nor even wearing, have, and pic-ture. But I was successful in comprehending thequestions and was able to respond correctly tothem.In this and later input I also began to hearoccasionally the word ine. I asked what itmeant. The instructor replied that it is thethird-person singular of the verb to be. Onewould assume that such knowledge would helpbind since the utterances would contain one lessunknown element. Unfortunately, at that timethis new knowledge caused me a great deal oftrouble because I would subsequently focus onineand often miss another more important itemin the input. Thus in a question like Is thedress


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 225that this woman is wearingblue? I would focus onine and miss fdrema (dress) and was unable toanswer the question. The problem was that,initially, I was unable to attend to much morethan one form per utterance. This stage did notlast long, of course, and within a few class hoursI was able to process two or three words perutterance and ine was bound in due time to"copula" as indeed was aftoto "demonstrative."Although knowledge of target languagegrammar may generally aid in the acquisitionprocess, the danger for instructors is to stresstoo much grammar too soon. A common prac-tice in French, Spanish, and German classesis to introduce the forms of the definite and in-definite articles within the first hour of instruc-tion. This practice is a mistake. The recogni-tion of articles does nothing to aid comprehen-sion; and the probability of binding meaningto the various articles and sorting out theirproper distribution so soon is very low. Spe-cific focus on verb affixes also usually happenstoo soon; knowledge of verb paradigms playslittle or no role in beginners' comprehension -which in early stages depends mostly on therecognition of the verb stems.34

CONCLUSIONCertain problems in the application ofKrashen'sL2 theory to foreign-languageclass-room teaching led me to re-examine the func-

tion of acquisition and learning for languagestudents. In this paperI redefine the terms"ac-quisition"and "learning"or the classroomcon-text in whatI call the binding/access rameworkfor acquisition. The redefinition does notchange the essence of Krashen's L2 theory.However, the new definitions have advantagesfor the language instructor: 1) they treat bothlexical and grammatical acquisition; 2) theyclarifythe relationshipbetweencomprehensionand speech in the acquisition process; and 3)they differentiatebetweenacquiredandlearnedknowledge without using a conscious-subcon-scious distinction. Within this framework,ac-quisition as a process is seen as a mixture ofconscious and subconscious attempts at bind-ing formand meaning and then accessingthoseforms for a communicative purpose. Learningexercisesmay in some cases aid the acquisitionprocess for many students.35

NOTES

1Stephen D. Krashen and Tracy D. Terrell, The NaturalApproach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom (Oxford:Pergamon; Hayward, CA: Alemany, 1983). See also TracyD. Terrell, "A Natural Approach to the Acquisition andLearning of a Language," Modern Language Journal, 61(1977), pp. 325-36; "The Natural Approach to LanguageTeaching: An Update," ModernLanguageJournal,66 (1982),pp. 121-32; Stephen D. Krashen, Tracy D. Terrell,Madeline Ehrman & Martha Herzog, "A Theoretical Basisfor Teaching the Receptive Skills," ForeignLanguageAnnals,17 (1984), pp. 261-75; Tracy D. Terrell, "The Natural Ap-proach in Bilingual Education," Schooling and LanguageMinority Students: A TheoreticalFramework(California StateDepartment of Education, Los Angeles: Evaluation, Dis-semination and Assessment Center, California State Uni-versity, Los Angeles, 1982).

2Stephen D. Krashen, Second Language Acquisition andSecond Language Learning (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981), andPrinciplesand Practice n SecondLanguage Acquisition (Oxford:Pergamon, 1982).

3Certain other conditions are not directly relevant to thisdiscussion: the acquirer must be focussed on the message,the input must be at a certain level (i + 1), and the acquirermust have a low "affective filter." See Krashen (note 2 above)for details.

4Leonard Newmark (personal communication) points outcorrectly that my focus is quite restrictive: acquisition doesnot just occur form by form; rather, acquirers tend to"chunk," to acquire pieces of routines, patterns, and under-standing and to produce them through various "approxi-mative" stages. I have chosen to restrict my attention tothe acquisition of forms and will not discuss the acquisitionof syntax (word order, transformations, etc.) here.5To my knowledge all scholars in second language acqui-sition use this definition. Comprehension is assumed butnot usually measured.

6My use of binding is related to the Sausurrean conceptsof signification and unrelated to Chomsky's use of the termin syntactic theory. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, Lec-tures on Governmentannd Binding (Foris: Dorecht, 1981).7See notes 1 and 2 above.sSee James J. Asher, Learning AnotherLanguage throughActions: The Complete Teacher'sGuide (Los Gatos, CA: SkyOaks, 1977), and Krashen & Terrell (note 1 above), pp.75-84.9I use my own broad phonetic transcription for Greek.10The NA Greek class was taught by Evris Tsakirides."1Superficially these input sequences appear to be nomore than modified audiolingual drills or grammatical exer-

cises. Transcribed speech always seems somewhat strange.In the case of early input sequences in NA, the repetitionwhich seems perfectly natural in context "looks funny" whenwritten down. However, when used with interesting visuals,with good intonation patterns and accompanying body lan-


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226 TracyDavid Terrellguage, these simple input sequences are normally quiteinteresting for the students. However, such sequences arenot, and are not meant to be, representative of real com-munication between native speakers of the target language.Herein lies a difference between the communicative ap-proach and NA. In the former, all input texts should berepresentative of natural, communicative events, hence theemphasis on authentic texts. In NA, on the other hand,we aim at input which is a reduced code (teacher talk)parallel to the interaction between a parent and small child(motherese) or between a native and a nonnative speaker(foreigner-talk) both of which correspond to Krashen's i + 1.The Greek sequence, while inauthentic as a text betweenadult speakers, would be perfectly natural between a motherand daughter looking at a picture book.121have defined access in this way so that it will be relateddirectly to acquisition. The term "access"could be used morebroadly than I have defined it here. Other sorts of accessexist. For example, in audiolingual drills students are forcedto access forms they are learning; in translation exercisesstudents are forced to access words they have not yetstudied. Presumably these mental searches would aid learn-ing more than acquisition.13For the most part, the syntax of beginning studentsappears to be that of their native language. However, theremay be simple pragmatic modes in which, for all practicalpurposes, there is no syntax but rather a stringing togetherof ideas in the order they are thought of. For some dataand discussion, see John Schumann, "Utterance Structurein Basilang Speech," Pidgen and CreoleLanguages. Essays inMemoryofJohn

E. Reinecke,ed. Glenn Gilbert (Ann Arbor:Karoma, 1983).'4Leonora Hoskins, "The Effects of Vocalization onRecall," unpublished paper read in a graduate seminar atthe University of California, San Diego, spring 1983.

'5See Krashen & Terrell (note 1 above), chapter 4.16E. V. Clark & R. A. Berman, "Structure and Use inthe Acquisition of Word Formation," Language, 60 (1984),pp. 542-90, refer to these properties as "semantic trans-parency" and "formal simplicity." They add two other gen-eral principles for the mastery of a word formation reper-toire: "productivity" and "conventionality.""'These activities are described in Tracy D. Terrell,Magdalena Andrade, Jeanne Egasse & E. Miguel Mufioz,Dos Mundos.: nstructor's dition (New York: Random House,1986).'8See also my essay "A Natural Approach to the Teachingof Verb Forms and Functions in Spanish," ForeignLanguageAnnals, 13 (1980), pp. 129-36.191view the production of grammatically complex forms(in this case stem + affix) in the following way. Complexforms are stored as complete words in the lexicon, i.e.,hablamos(we speak) is stored and accessed as a single unit.However, acquirers also formulate (and store) generaliza-tions about grammatically complex words. With thesegeneralizations they are able to understand and generateforms not previously encountered in the input. This viewis based on Joan L. Bybee & D. I. Slobin, "Rules andSchemas in the Development and Use of the English Past,"Language,60 (1982), Ip. 265-89. However, Bybee & Slobinposit this analysis only for irregular past tense forms in

English. They state explicitly (their note 10) "it is possiblethat some regular past tense forms, particularly of high fre-quency verbs, are also stored in the lexicon, but we havefound no evidence in the current research to support thispossibility" (p. 268).

201 view agreement rules in terms of lexical access, notmorpheme addition. In this view los automdvilesnuevos(thenew cars) is produced by accessing three plural forms los,automdviles, and nuevos, not by accessing stems and thenadding suffixes while generating an utterance. Lexical accessimplies that all forms in a paradigm are stored lexically andaccessed as such. In addition, a speaker also stores rulesand can use them to generate novel forms, either thosewhich have never occurred in the input or those which haveoccurred so infrequently that they have not yet been storedlexically (see also note 19 above). In this view, numberagreement is a co-occurrence restriction on access of pluralforms.

21I should, in all fairness, point out that one is not forcedto view the acquisition of grammatical morphemes by for-eign language students as an important goal. In that case,no reason would exist to try to control the input. Certainly,traditional syllabi, texts, materials, and even methodolo-gies viewed the learning of grammar as the principal (andoften, only) goal in a foreign language course.220ne might object that L2 theory as currently formu-lated is incompatible with the idea that instructor manipula-tion of input can speed up the acquisition of a particularmorpheme since these are presumably acquired in a"natural" order. However, there are reasons to reject sucha position. Factors must exist which operate in the acqui-sition process to cause a natural order of acquisition. Al-though we do not know exactly what these factors are, wecan hypothesize that they might include such things as:semantic transparency, allomorphy, usefulness, redun-dancy, salience, frequency, and so forth. These factors (orothers) must interact in rather complex ways to producethe natural order found in so many studies. If these arethe factors that control the natural order, then it followsthat acquisition might be speeded up, or the order evenchanged if we could manipulate some of the controllingfactors. Although such control of input is difficult, it cer-tainly is not impossible in a foreign language context: thelanguage instructor often completely controls the input inthe target language. The factors most "controllable" are fre-quency, salience, and usefulness. By radical control of theinput and the topics of the communicative interactions, theinstructor could conceivably speed up at least the acquisi-tion of certain morphemes and in some cases even changetheir natural order of acquisition. The issue is somewhatuninteresting for language instructors since, in most cases,we do not know what the natural order is anyway and there-fore have no way of measuring the effect of the strategiesproposed here.

23Heidi Dulay, Marina Burt & Stephen Krashen, Lan-guage Two (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).

24Roger Brown, A First Language (Cambridge: HarvardUniv. Press, 1973).25Several colleagues have pointed out that this view of

acquisition implies that even the first (dominant) languageis never completely acquired. For example, there exist many


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Acquisition in the Natural Approach 227words we understand but which we do not (or even couldnot) produce easily. Within the binding/access framework,these forms would be considered to be only partially ac-quired, i.e., bound, but not accessed. To take anotherexample, second generation "natives" who can understand,but not produce their "mother"tongue, must be said to haveonly partially acquired that language.26H. Douglas Brown, "The Consensus: Another View,"Foreign Language Annals, 17 (1984), pp. 177-80, notes:"Psychologists are still pursuing definitions of conscious-ness and have not reached any sort of explanatory adequacyin that pursuit - at least none that psychologists can agreeon." However, my proposal in this paper to define acqui-sition and learning without appealing to a "conscious-sub-conscious" dichotomy does not lead in the direction Brownproposes, namely that acquisition and learning are the finalpoints of a single continuum.27Theodore V. Higgs (San Diego State Univ.), personalcommunication.

28My preliminary work with native speakers of Englishwho have acquired Spanish in the Dominican Republicwithout formal instruction or study indicates that consciousbinding strategies are used far less by "natural" acquirersthan by students in a classroom. A typical comment was"I didn't really make a conscious effort to remember a newword since I knew that I would hear it many times a dayand it would just sink in by itself."29The lack of careful attention to the input may be theprincipal cause of fossilization among adult L2 acquirers.In L1 acquisition, children imitate, first, adults and, later,their peers. This "imitation" also applies to language: chil-dren want to "sound like" everyone else around them. Ibelieve that, precisely because of this strong drive towardimitation, children attend to details in the input which arenot strictly necessary for the communication of informa-tion. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from children'sawareness of the difference between the input and their pro-duction. For example, my four-year-old niece became veryupset when, using her pronunciation, I asked about hertrip on the "erplane." She was aware of the differencebetween her pronunciation and the pronunciation in theinput and she correctly interpreted that I was making funof her inability to imitate a model. Adults, in most cases,do not have the same strong drive to assimilate completelyand "be like" natives of L2. I do not mean to imply thatsuch an integrative motivation is necessary for perfect L2acquisition, but rather that such motivation produces agreater "attention" to the input and that this attention (notthe motivation per se) results in accurate binding and laterfacility in access. In "Communicative Competence: SomeRules of Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible Out-put in its Development" (presented at the University ofSouthern California, 1983), Merrill Swain makes a similarproposal in her attempt to explain why Canadian Frenchimmersion students lag behind their native French coun-terparts despite many years of presumably good compre-hensible input. She says: "the claim, then, is that produc-ing the target language may be the trigger that forces thelearner to pay attention to the means of expression neededin order to successfully convey his or her own intendedmeaning."

30Michael Long, "Does Second Language InstructionMake a Difference? A Review of Research," TESOL Quar-terly, 17 (1983), pp. 359-82, examines the effect of formalsecond language instruction on language proficiency andconcludes that we have "considerable evidence to indicatethat SL instruction does make a difference." He shows thatthe effect of instruction holds: 1) for children as well asadults; 2) for intermediate and advanced students, not justbeginners; 3) on integrative as well as discrete-point tests;and 4) in acquisition-rich as well as acquisition-poor envi-ronments. Long claims (p. 374): "Instruction is supposedto result in learning, defined by Krashen as consciousknowledge of rules of SL." His study leads him to suggesta redefining of the construct learning, which "currentlyseems too narrow." Although, in principle, I agree withLong's conclusions, my approach in this paper has beenthe opposite, i.e., a broadening of the concept of acquisi-tion and a narrowing of what is considered to be learning(although perhaps a broadening of its role in acquisition).The problem is Krashen's characterization of acquisitionas a subconscious process. If acquisition, as defined in thebinding-access framework, can include conscious attentionto language and language forms, then much of what goeson in formal instruction can be thought of as an aid to acqui-sition directly. Therefore, I do not assume that formal lan-guage classes must necessarily equate with learning(although this is still too often the case in foreign languageclasses).31See H. Douglas Brown (note 26 above); M. Sharwood-Smith, "Consciousness-Raising and the Second LanguageLearner," Applied Linguistics, 11 (1981), pp. 159-68.32See Krashen, 1982 (note 2 above). I do not supportin either case the position that learning "becomes" acquisi-tion. Learning may indeed aid in binding and in access,but the conditions posited for acquisition by Krashen's L2theory (see note 2 above) still hold even after the form hasbeen learned, i.e., it must be used in comprehensible inputin a communicative context such that binding can take placeand the student must have ample opportunities to accessand produce the form to communicate messages.330n the other hand, time spent on the study of vocabu-lary would clearly have been better spent listening to addi-tional comprehensible input. For example, recorded textsat my level of competence containing the words used inclass would have been much more helpful than simple rotereview and study. Thus, even though I claim that learningcan aid acquisition, I do not assume that learning is themost desirable way to enhance acquisition for all studentsin all contexts.

34Barry Taylor, "Teaching ESL: Incorporating a Com-municative, Student-Centered Component," TESOL Quar-terly, 17 (1983), pp. 69-88, offers other reasons for explicitgrammar instruction: 1) to supplement communicativeexperiences; 2) to make up for the lack of input; 3) to usethe target language in the teaching of grammar; and 4) tosatisfy a perceived need of the students.

35Iam grateful for comments and suggestions which weremade on early drafts of this paper by Trisha Dvorak, JamesLee, Bill VanPatten, Theodore Higgs, Stephen Krashen,Robin Scarcella, Roni LeBauer, Betty Leeman, IreneDaniels, Robert Maple, and Leonard Newmark.

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