KRASHENstrongSstrong SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORY AND THE TEACHING.pdfVIP

Elizabeth Taylor Tricomi KRASHENS SECOND-LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORY AND THE TEACHING OF EDITED AMERICAN ENGLISH Recent research in composition theory has provided writing teachers with an abundance of information and techniques for teaching most parts of the writing process. They have only to pick up a journal or attend a conference in order to be supplied with the latest ideas on everything from heuristics, to conferencing, to teaching revising through word pro- cessing. When teaching the mechanics of writing, to help students gain control of Edited American English (EAE), however, many w riting teachers feel at a loss . On this topic , one research study after another has shown that the formal study of grammar does not improve students writing. 1 Writing teachers know, in fact , that the deviations from EAE in their students papers are apt to be the most distracting and damning flaws to general readers and perhaps to many professors as well. Faced with this situation, what are writing teachers to do? One answer is that instead of basing their pedagogy exclusively on the results of group com- parison studies2 or on personal conviction grounded in experience, they can turn for guidance to research on language acquisition. Particularly useful in this regard is the second-language acquisition theory of Stephen D. Krashen which has major implications for the teaching of writing in the first language. Central to Krashens theory of second-language acquisition is his distinction between language acquisition and language learning, a distinc- tion which other second-language acquisition researchers have called perhaps the most important conceptualization in the field and [one which] has made possible the most productive models of SLA [second- Elizab eth Taylor Tricomi, adiunct instructor of English at SUNY-Binghamton, has been p