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acquisition
, a process similar, if not identical, to the
way children develop their knowledge/ability in the first language. It is a
subconscious process. Acquisition, therefore, is “picking-up” a language in-
cidentally. Another way is
learning
. It refers to conscious knowledge of an
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137
L2, knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about
them. Learning, therefore, is developing language knowledge/ability in-
tentionally. His monitor hypothesis posits that acquisition and learning are
used in very specific ways. Acquisition “initiates” our utterances in L2 and is
responsible for our fluency. Learning comes into play only to make changes
in the form of our utterance, after it has been “produced” by the acquired
system. Together, the three hypotheses claim that incidental learning is
what counts in the development of L2 knowledge/ability. It must, however,
be noted that Krashen does not completely rule out intentional learning
which, he believes, may play a marginal role.
Unlike Krashen, Prabhu claims that language development is exclusively
incidental. He dismisses any explicit teaching of descriptive grammar to
learners, not even for monitor use as advocated by Krashen. He rightly
points out that the sequence and the substance of grammar that is exposed
to the learners through systematic instruction may not be the same as the
learners’ mental representation of it. He, therefore, sees no reason why any
structure or vocabulary has to be consciously presented by the teacher or
practiced by the learner. The CTP operates under the assumption that
while the conscious mind is working out some of the meaning-content, a sub-
conscious part of the mind perceives, abstracts, or acquires (or recreates, as a
cognitive structure) some of the linguistic structuring embodied in those enti-
ties, as a step in the development of an internal system of rules. (Prabhu,
1987, pp. 69–70)
The extent to which learning-centered pedagogists emphasize inciden-
tal learning is only partially supported by research on L2 learning and
teaching. As discussed in chapter 2 and chapter 3, research makes it amply
clear that learners need to pay conscious attention to, and notice the lin-
guistic properties of, the language as well. It has been argued that there can
be no L2 learning without attention and noticing although it is possible
that learners may learn one thing when their primary objective is to do
something else (Schmidt, 1993). As Hulstjin (2003) concluded in a recent
review,
on the one hand, both incidental and intentional learning require some at-
tention and noticing. On the other hand, however, attention is deliberately
directed to committing new information to memory in the case of intentional
learning, whereas the involvement of attention is not deliberately geared to-
ward an articulated learning goal in the case of incidental learning. (p. 361)
Language development is meaning focused, not form focused.
Closely linked to
the principle of incidental learning is the emphasis placed by learning-
centered methods on meaning-focused activities. This principle, which is in
138
CHAPTER 7
fact the cornerstone of learning-centered methods, holds that L2 develop-
ment is not a matter of accumulation and assimilation of phonological, syn-
tactic and semantic features of the target language, but a matter of under-
standing the language input “where ‘understand’ means that the acquirer
is focused on the meaning and not the form of the message” (Krashen,
1982, p. 21). Learning-centered pedagogists point out the futility of focus-
ing on form by arguing that
the internal system developed by successful learners is far more complex than
any grammar yet constructed by a linguist, and it is, therefore, unreasonable
to suppose that any language learner can acquire a deployable internal system
by consciously understanding and assimilating the rules in a linguist’s gram-
mar, not to mention those in a pedagogic grammar which represent a simpli-
fication of the linguist’s grammars and consequently can only be still further
removed from the internally developed system. (Prabhu, 1987, p. 72)
These statements clearly echo an earlier argument by Newmark (1966) that
“the study of grammar as such is neither necessary nor sufficient for learn-
ing to use a language” (p. 77).
The emphasis on an exclusively meaning-focused activity ignores the
crucial role played by language awareness (see section 2.3.5 on knowledge
factors) and several other intake factors and intake processes in L2 develop-
ment. What is more, it even ignores the active role played by learners them-
selves in their own learning effort (see section 2.3.3 on tactical factors).
Even if the textbook writer or the classroom teacher provides modified in-
put that makes meaning salient, it is up to the learner to recognize or not to
recognize it as such. As Snow (1987) perceptively observed, what learners
have in mind when they are asked to do meaning-focused activities is more
important than what is in the mind of the teacher. She goes on to argue,
“learners might be doing a good deal of private, intra-cerebral work to
make sense of, analyze, and remember the input, thus in fact imposing con-
siderable intentional learning on a context that from the outside looks as if
it might generate mostly incidental learning” (p. 4).
Snow’s observations are quite revealing because, during the course of
the CTP project, Prabhu (1987) had seen that
individual learners became suddenly preoccupied, for a moment, with some
piece of language, in ways apparently unrelated to any immediate demands of
the on-going activity in the classroom. . . . It is possible to speculate whether
such moments of involuntary language awareness might be symptoms (or
“surfacings”) of some internal process of learning, representing, for instance,
a conflict in the emerging internal system leading to system revision. (p. 76)
What Prabhu describes may perhaps be seen as one indication of learners
doing the kind of private, intracerebral work to which Snow alerted us.
LEARNING-CENTERED METHODS
139
Prabhu (1987) counters such learner behavior by arguing that “if the in-
stances of involuntary awareness are symptoms of some learning process,
any attempt to increase or influence them directly would be effort misdi-
rected to symptoms, rather than to causes” (p. 77). This argument, of
course, assumes that any “involuntary language awareness” on the part of
the learner is only a symptom and not a cause. Our current state of knowl-
edge is too inadequate to support or reject this assumption.
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