Stephen Krashen's Theory Of Second Language Acquisition

Over the past fifty years, research into the acquisition of a second language has progressed. The research has gone against the traditional belief that our students can learn and master a second language through drills, grammar practice, metacognition and other forms of measured output practice. Contrary to these beliefs, the aforementioned practices do not aid children in learning a language. In today’s schools, more and more teachers are beginning to follow on the footsteps of new research and change the way they teach so that they can set their students up for prosperity when it comes to learning their second language. The style of teaching that teachers have found to help students learn their second langauge is modeled after Stephen Krashen’s Theory of Second Language Acquisition, which states that students learn more about a language when they learn less about grammar rules, and more about the language itself.

Stephen Krashen follows this with the next hypothesis, called the Monitor hypothesis, which expresses that knowing grammar rules can help writing in the language, but hinders communication in the language. His third hypothesis, the Input hypothesis, says that students learn the target langauge much better when they are given input a little bit above their level of understanding. In the Natural Order hypothesis, Krashen claims that there is a natural order in each language, where different aspects of the language are easier to learn than others. In the final hypothesis of his theory, the Affective Filter hypothesis, Krashen says that motivation, anxiety, confidence and other factors affect learning a second