a stage many people, but not all, reach at about age 12 (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). The formal thinker has the ability to "verbally... manipulate relationships between ideas in the absence of prior or concurrent empirical propositions" (Ausubel and Ausubel, 1971, p. 63). For formal thinkers, new concepts are acquired primarily "from verbal rather than from concrete experiences" (ibid., p. 66). The formal thinker also has a meta-awareness of his ideas and can use abstract rules to solve a whole class of problems at one time. It is thus plausible that the ability to use a conscious grammar, requiring a meta-awareness of language and general abstract rules, comes as a result of formal operations. (That is to say that formal operations gives the adult a greater ability to make conscious generalizations about language. It is not to say that children, especially older children, have no such ability. They clearly do (Hatch, 1976; Cazden, 1975) but not to as great an extent.) Thus, formal operations may give us the Monitor. But it also has negative effects on language acquisition, a poor exchange that may be the cause of child-adult differences.

According to Elkind (1970), formal operations may have profound affective consequences. I have reviewed Elkind's argument in detail elsewhere (1975b), so I will be brief here. Elkind claims that with formal operations the adolescent gains a greater capacity to conceptualize the thoughts of others. This capacity, however, "is the crux of adolescent egocentrism... (the adolescent) fails to differentiate between the objects toward which the thoughts of others are directed and those which are the focus of his own concern" (p. 67). In other words, the adolescent makes the error of thinking that others are thinking about what he is most concerned with: himself. This belief "that others are preoccupied with his appearance and behaviour" (p. 53) leads to the increased self-consciousness, feelings of vulnerability, and lowered self-image that are associated with this age. In our terms, it leads to an increased affective filter and a subsequently lowered ability to acquire a second language. (Pronunciation seems to be the most difficult aspect of a second language to acquire after this age, perhaps because it runs "deeper into the center of the students' personality than any other aspect of language" (Stevick, 1976, p. 64; see also Seliger, Krashen, and Ladefoged, 1975).

This hypothesis has its predictions as well.

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