overconcern with correctness, however, can be a problem. The overuser may be so concerned with form that he or she is unable to speak with any fluency at all.

The Overuser

Stafford and Covitt (1978) present an instructive case of a Monitor overuser: S, a Finnish speaker who, like P, knows many of the rules of English, but who is often unable to communicate in speech. While her written English is quite accurate, Stafford and Covitt remark that "she speaks very little, because she tries to remember and use grammar rules before speaking". S's self-correction behavior reveals her lack of faith in her acquired knowledge of English. Stafford, and Covitt report that she generally does not trust her intuitions about English syntax but relies on conscious rules. S describes her own situation as follows: "I feel bad... when I put words together and I don't know nothing about the grammar."

Birnbaum (1976) characterizes the speech of Hector, another adult second language performer and ESL student who shows signs of overuse, as follows: "In a segment of conversation that lasted slightly less than fifteen minutes, there is not a single lengthy utterance that is not filled with pauses, false starts, repetitions, and other speech repairs.... There are over 69... instances of repair (not counting pauses)." We are not surprised to learn that Hector's written English, his class compositions "produced in a situation where extreme monitoring is possible--are among the best in his section".

The Monitor overuser refers to his conscious grammar all the time when using his second language. This may be due to an overconcern with correctness, "S", the overuser described by Stafford and Covitt (1978), who admitted that "I feel bad when I put words together and I don't know nothing about the rules", is clearly this sort. Mr. J., described by Nida (1956), also seems to be an overuser of this type. Mr. J., a missionary, became an expert in the grammar of his target language but never spoke it. Nida suggests that this may have stemmed from his early use of a nonprestige dialect of English and his efforts to learn the prestige form ("he felt he could not dare for a minute to make a 'mistake', thus exposing his background and

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