from the point of view of the then new "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).
As mentioned in Note 10 of the previous section, this process of converting learned rules into acquired rules was called "internalization".
Despite our feelings that internalization does occur, the theory predicts that it does not, except in a trivial way. Language acquisition, according to the theory presented in Chapter II, happens in one way, 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. (The trivial sense in which a conscious rule might "help" language acquisition is if the performer used a rule as a Monitor, and consistently applied it to his own output. Since we understand our own output, part of that performer's comprehensible input would include utterances with that structure. When the day came when that performer was "ready" to acquire this already learned rule, his own performance of it would qualify as comprehensible input at "i + 1". In other words, self-stimulation!)
In addition to the fact that the theory does not directly predict that learning needs to precede acquisition, there are very good reasons for maintaining this position that emerge from observing second language performers.
First, we often see acquisition in cases where learning never occurred. There are many performers who can use complex structures in a second language who do not know the rule consciously and never did. There have been several case histories in the second language acquisition literature that illustrate this phenomenon, one which I think is quite common.
Evelyn Hatch's 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. The