Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition

following exchanges come from an interview with "V", which takes place while one of the authors is reviewing his composition errors (from Stafford and Covitt, 1978; also quoted in Krashen, 1978):

Interviewer:

(When you write a composition)... do you think of grammar rules? Do you think "Should I have used the present tense here or would the present continuous be better..."

"I don't refer to the books and all that, you know. I just refer it to this, uh, my judgment and... sensing if I'm writing it right or wrong. Because I really don't know... what where exactly how... the grammatical rules work out.

Later in the interview, one investigator asks:

Interviewer:

Do you think grammar rules are useful?

Useful? Yeah. When you want to write they are very very useful.

Interviewer:

But you don't use them when you write.

Yeah, I know. I don't use them... I don't know how to use them.

Another good example of an "under-user" of the conscious grammar is Hung, studied by Cohen and Robbins (1976), who stated:

"I never taught any grammar. I guess I just never learned the rules that well. I know that every time I speak it's pretty correct, so I never think about grammars. I just write down whatever I feel like it. Everytime I write something I just stop thinking. I don't know which (rule) to apply" (p. 59).

Not only is what Hung says revealing, but so is how he says it. There are, for sure, errors in this passage, but there is also control of fairly complex syntax and a real ability for self-expression. (Not all under-users succeed, of course; see, for example, Schumann's description of Alberto in Schumann (1978a).) If conscious rules have to come first, how can we explain cases such as V, Hung, and others? (For other case histories, see Krashen, 1978; Stafford and Covitt, 1978; Kounin and Krashen 1978.) Unless all cases such as these can be shown to be instances of the use of the first language or routines and patterns the existence of such cases show that previous conscious learning is not necessary for language acquisition.