between acquisition and learning, a failure to realize that conscious knowledge of an item bears no relationship to a performer's ability to use it in unmonitored speech. This ability comes from acquisition, and acquisition come from comprehensible input, not from error correction. The result of such treatment is, at best, overuse of the Monitor. At worst, it results in the establishment of such a strong Affective Filter that acquisition is impossible.
Condition three for Monitor use (Chapter II, Hypothesis 3) is relevant to discussing this point. In order for performers to Monitor successfully, they must know the rule they are applying. To expand on a point made in Chapter II, let me attempt to illustrate just how drastically this requirement limits Monitor use. Let this circle represent all the rules of a well-described language, such as English:
Let us now consider all the rules of English that the best linguists "know", or have succeeded in describing. How many rules did Jespersen (ever) know, how much of English have scholars such as Noam Chomsky described? While Chomsky often says that he and his colleagues have only described "fragments" of English, we will give the formal linguists the benefit of the doubt, and represent their accomplishments as a proper subset of the first circle
Now let us consider the rules that "applied linguists" know, where applied linguists here refers to the scholar whose task is to study the
92
