for communication and might contain input at some acquirers' i + 1. On the other hand, there is the question of whether the ungrammaticality of much interlanguage talk outweighs these factors. Also, much interlanguage talk input might be too simple and may not contain i + 1 for the more advanced acquirer. See Krashen (1980, 1981) for a discussion of some of the empirical evidence that might shed light on this issue.

In a recent study, M. Long (1980) reported that foreigner talk discourse did not contain significantly more verbs marked for present tense than native speaker-native speaker discourse. It is thus not more in the "now" of the "here and now", to paraphrase Long.

A look at some of the memorized sentences and phrases children pick up during the silent period confirms their utility in a variety of social situations. Quite often, however, the children do not always acquire the knowledge of exactly when and how to use them. A particularly vivid example is the child, who had been in the United States approximately two months, who greeted an acquaintance of mine with "I kick you ass."

Conscious Monitoring need not always result in the full repair of an L1 influenced error. If the repair job appears to be too complex for the Monitor to deal with, the performer may simply abort the entire sentence and try to express the idea in a simpler way. This may be the cause of the avoidance phenomena, first reported by Schachter (1974). In Schachter's study, it was shown that Chinese and Japanese speakers produced fewer relative clauses in English as a second language than did Farsi and Arabic speakers, but were more accurate. Schachter relates this result to L1-L2 differences: Chinese and Japanese relative clauses are constructed to the left of the head noun, while Farsi and Arabic, like English, have relative clauses to the right of the head noun.

One possible interpretation is that the Chinese and Japanese speakers in Schachter's study consciously knew the correct English relative clause rule but had not acquired it. Also, in their production of English, they utilized their L1 rule. Their Monitor was thus presented with the task of moving relative clauses around a head noun, a very complex operation. In many cases, subjects simply decided that it was not worth the effort! When they did produce relative clauses, however, they were accurate. These were the cases when they went to the trouble of applying a difficult rule.

Avoidance is thus predicted in cases where a rule has been consciously learned but not acquired, and when the L1 and L2 rules are quite different, where repair by the Monitor requires difficult mental gymnastics.

Avoidance is also predicted in cases where the performer consciously knows the rule imperfectly, not well enough to make the necessary chance but well enough to see a mismatch between the L1 rule he has used and the correct target language rule. Since he cannot repair but knows there is an error, he can exercise his option to avoid the structure. Kleinman's avoidance data (Kleinman, 1977) fits this description. His Arabic-speaking subjects showed evidence of avoiding the passive in English, and his Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking subjects avoided infinitive complements and direct object pronouns in sentences with infinitive complements (e.g. "I told her to leave"). In both cases, according to Kleinman, contrastive analysis predicts difficulties. These subjects, unlike Schachter's, were not unusually accurate with these constructions when they produced them. In this case, it is possible that the subject's knowledge of the rule was not complete enough to effect a perfect repair, so avoidance was the result.

In both cases described above, conscious rules serve a filtering function, telling the performer where his L1 rule differs from the L2 rule. In one case, repair is possible but difficult, and in the other the conscious rule does not permit repair.

Based on Hyltenstam's data on the acquisition of negation by adult acquirers of Swedish (Hyltenstam, 1977), Hammarberg (1979) argues that acquirers may begin at