missing, etc. Both scholars publish all of their current work in English and do not consult anyone to review their papers for errors, nor is this necessary.

My own experience may be helpful to readers. I am, at the time of this writing, an "intermediate" level speaker of French as a second language. (This means, according to my definition, that I can converse comfortably with a monolingual speaker of French as long as (s)he makes some compensation. I cannot eavesdrop very well and have some trouble with radio and films. Also, my output is fairly fluent, but not error-free.) Many people at this level, including myself, make errors on rules that are easy to describe, but that are apparently fairly late-acquired. One rule like this I have noted is the simple contraction rule:

            de + le = du.

I, and my classmates in intermediate conversational French at USC, occasionally miss this one in free conversation. On the occasions when I write French, however, I get it right every time. (My accuracy or difficulty order changes when I use my conscious knowledge of French grammar. Correctly applying the de + le = du rule raises this item from a low position in the difficulty order to one near the top. This is exactly what I attempted to say in Chapter I, Hypothesis 3, in discussing distortions of the natural order in Monitored conditions. I differ from the average subject in that I do not require a discrete-point grammar test to focus me on form. Most readers of this book are probably like this as well.)

This kind of behavior is natural and normal. What is tragic, in my opinion, is that teachers expect perfect performance of such simple, yet late-acquired items in unmonitored performance. Even quite competent second language users, such as P, will "miss" such items in conversation. We often see, however, beginners, students who can barely converse in the target language, struggling to make correct subject-verb agreement in what are termed "communicative" exercises, fearful of the teacher's shattering corrections. The cause of this torture is, first of all, a confusion between linguistic simplicity and order of acquisition--it is not at all the case that the more linguistically simple an item is, the earlier it is acquired. Some very "simple" rules may be among the last to be acquired. Second, the cause is also a failure to distinguish

91