Krashen’s Monitor Model & the Teaching of Writing George Braine, Ph.D. ELT Consultant

The Monitor Model The monitor model/input hypothesis is a group of five hypotheses of second-language acquisition developed by the linguist Stephen Krashen in the 1970s and 1980s.

1. Language Acquisition and Language Learning Acquisition is the unconscious absorption of language, when real language is used for real communication. Learning takes place when consciously studying the rules of a language. Acquisition is more powerful than learning.

1. Language Acquisition and Language Learning This also relates to error correction, which may have some use in learning but little effect on acquisition. For instance, children do not retain idiosyncratic versions of their L1 despite the errors they make while acquiring the language. Further, when parents sometimes correct children’s grammatical errors, the corrections seem to have no effect at all.

2. Natural Order of Morpheme Acquisition Studies of children learning English as their L1 show their errors are developmental and that the acquisition of correct forms occur in a predictable sequence. Children and adults of various language backgrounds learning English as their L2 also show a natural order for English morpheme acquisition. Thus, for both L1 and L2, the acquisition order is natural, fixed, and impervious to error correction.

3. The Monitor Language rules learned by the learner contribute little to the learner’s language ability. They can be used to monitor and clean up the learner’s language output. That is, rules learned through error correction and direct instruction in grammar may only have a tiny effect on language production. Even if the learner learns every language rule, their usefulness is limited.

4. Comprehensible Input For both L1 and L2 learners, for acquisition to occur, the language input must be comprehensible to the learner. If the input is not comprehensible, the language becomes meaningless noise.

5. Affective Filter Why is that older people don’t learn an L2 as well as children do? Because affective factors play an important role in learning an L2. The affective filter prevents even the most comprehensible, meaningful, and communicative input from being taken in. If the affective filter is high , the learner will not receive the input.

The Monitor Model’s applicability to the Teaching of Writing The distinction between acquiring and learning language relates to the accepted notion that good writers are good readers. The ability to write well is acquired through exposure to texts, and not through the learning of rules of writing. That is, to learn to write English acceptably, learners need exposure to texts, not to grammatical and rhetorical rules on writing in English.

The Monitor Model’s applicability to the Teaching of Writing Students’ writing errors, like the errors of children learning an L1, are resistant to correction. Error correction simply has no effect on the acquisition process.

The Monitor Model’s applicability to the Teaching of Writing Comprehensible input, in the form of reading, promotes acquisition of written language. Learning rules of grammar, punctuation, etc, is useful only to monitor, or edit, writing, not to create it.

The Monitor Model’s applicability to the Teaching of Writing Writers are prevented in their development by affective variables caused by their past failures and by criticisms of their past attempts to write. Krashen’s model is especially relevant to young writers who are attempting to write in an L2.

The Monitor Model’s applicability to the Teaching of Writing Many of these writers are convinced, from their primary and secondary school experiences, that the way to learn an L2 is to study the rules of the language. Krashen, S. (1979), “The Monitor Model for second language acquisition,” in R. Gingras (ed.) Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching, CAL Leki, Ilona. Understanding ESL Writers, 1992.