As someone who knows a little bit about second language research, I wish
I knew what the reference is for the following claim.

Johanna Rubba wrote:

>As to learning by internalizing, second-language research shows that people do acquire a second language (or dialect) by immersion; that is,they _subconsciously_ construct an internal grammar as they learn.
>Whether they ever perfect that new language/dialect or not has to do
>with amount of exposure, motivation, and various other internal and
>external factors.
>
I agree that all learners construct on internal grammar, but the claim
being made here is that only immersion is necessary and no attention to
form. I know of no such study which supports this claim and it is not a
generally accepted conclusion in the second language research community
I know.

Several years ago, I was on another list with Stephen Krashen, the
person in the field of second language research most associated with
this claim. Here is what Krashen wrote:

CI is necessary but not sufficient. This is stated in Input Hypothesis
(1985), fn 8, page 25. The hypothesis, in a nutshell, is as follows: CI
will give ultimately give you all you need for everyday communication.
But if you want the redundant aspects of language, the ones that mark
you as a member of the group, two routes are available:
(1) the acquirer considers him/herself to be a potential member of the club
of target language users (Smith, F. Joining the Literacy Club, 1983; also
Gardner and Lambert's notion of integrative motivation). When this happens,
the redundant features are acquired.
(2) conscious learning: Using those part of the brain not designed for
language acquisition. This is the hard way. The knowledge will not be
available to the speaker at all times, and there are limits on how much can
be consciously learned.

****
The reference to the footnote is interesting.  I looked it up.  He cites
Susan Goldin-Meadow's work on home sign, the gestural system developed
by deaf children in hearing homes  (The title of the article by
Goldin-Meadow that Krashen refers to is "The resilience of recursion: A
study of a communication system developed without a conventional
language model.")  These deaf children were not getting any
comprehensible input from any language because no one in their
households knew American Sign Language.

Although I do not understand how research on home sign supports the
comprehensible input hypothesis or any claim about immersion, I was very
perplexed by how Krashen identifies the "fragile" properties of language
in the footnote.  These fragile/redundant properties in the footnote are
movement rules, auxiliary structure, inflections, and pro-forms.

So, according to Krashen, the proponent of the claim about immersion,
features necessary for question formation and relative clauses (movement
rules), the entire tense aspect system of English (auxiliary structure),
inflectional morphology (the plural-s, comparative, superlative
morphology, past tense morphology), and the entire pronoun system are
not going to be "acquired" just by immersion.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

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