Bill and Craig, Thank you both for your thoughtful replies to my post on the importance of the competence-performance for language teachers. I used sentence (1), a real sentence written by an L1 Chinese student I'm teaching this semester. 1) They are not agree with the Input Hypothesis. I proposed that the error in (1) is not with "are" but the student's underlying representation of the work "agree." The student told be for her "agree" is an adjective. Among other things, I noted correcting "are" and replacing with "do" would not really help this student because such a correction does not provide her with the explanation why the "are" is incorrect here. Craig noted: It's certainly good to be reminded that merely correcting the surface errors on a text isn't good pedagogical practice. I'm not sure "competence" and "performance" are the best terms to account for a connection between what a student does and what he/she understands, but it all makes sense. *** Of course, he is right. In this case the "surface error" -- "are" should be "do" is not correct. I wish he had provided his understanding of why the student wrote (1) in the first place. In this regard, Bill's response is more interesting. I wish he had written more. Bill notes correctly with the competence/performance distinction. >>> "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> 2/23/2009 12:56 PM >>> If you're claiming that only a competence/performance-distinguishing model can deal with those phenomena, you're wrong. If you're claiming that we can deal with them only by talking about what speakers seem to think/assume/believe about a language -- i.e., that we have to make some statements about internal states if we're making other than purely descriptive statements -- you're right. But *lots* of theories, including most functionalist ones, are in the same camp you are on that one. **** He is, of course, right that other theories posit internal states that are the result of input and not the result of some innate knowledge of principles of language. I tried to address such an alternative explanation in my original post. I want to consider the alternative account that Bill provides: I should probably clarify my comments a bit. You'll notice toward the end of that earlier post, I throw in the following: >>I think functionalists in general don’t mind claiming that performance >>(including comprehension in a social context, rather than just >>production) partly creates competence as an epiphenomenon...<< The "partly" was there by intention, as was the entailment that competence exists (you can't create something that is nonexistent....well, barring certain interpretations of null-elements). Obviously, native speakers do have the ability to recognize if novel strings are acceptable in their language or not. Production and comprehension appear to conform to certain norms, and it's hard to deal with that without positing some kind of "rest state" system (not impossible, since I *think* Eco's semiotics manages it, but I'm by no means positive). Functionalists tend to think the fundamental characteristics of that system are determined by general cognitive constraints together with *meaningful* interaction with other speakers, rather than by the operation of a specific-only-to-language module on a semantically neutral set of input strings. If for "competence" we substitute "how one expects the language to act, given what's gone before," we've got something closer to the functionalist conception (or at least, my version of it). *** I want to consider Bill's functionalist explanation for how we come to what we know about language and what that means for BOTH the student and the teacher's knowledge of the language. If "meaningful" interaction and general cognitive constraints are what determines what we know about language , we have to be puzzled why any student would write (1). We can be pretty confident that a student in the States would never encounter such a sentence like (1) with just "agree." As I noted in my original post, (2) and (3) are possible. (2) They are not agreeing with the Input Hypothesis. (3) They are not in agreement with the Input Hypothesis. Because, I think, a functionalist explanation tries to avoid abstract representations, my explanation of why the student wrote (1) -- agree is an adjective - is not a possible functionalist explanation. I'm not a functionalists, so here is my question: What are the general cognitive constraints operating in "meaningful interaction," that resulted in this student concluding agree is an adjective? I wish I could read a plausible functionalist account. Now let's consider the teacher's response to (1) from the functionalist explanation. As native speakers we are confronted with a sentence we have never encountered before in any meaningful interaction. Although we understand it, we recognize it is ungrammatical because ARE should be DO. So, we cross out ARE and write DO. If the only thing we know about language is through meaningful interaction and general cognitive constraints, how do we even suppose that (1) is the result of the writer having the wrong category for "agree." Those categories are merely the result of an epiphenomona of the frequencies we have unconsciously noted in the language. As a teacher considering this string and whose knowledge of English is the result of interactions, we also realize that (1) is just as likely the result of the student meaning to write (2) and (3). We now have to decide how many possibilities we put on the student's paper to indicate why (1) is not English. Again, I'm not a functionalist, so I feel very uncomfortable providing explanations for a perspective I don't know very well. I want to be corrected if I have misstated anything. I am a language teacher; I teach both native and non-native speakers of English and I teach about the nature of language to pre-service teachers who will be teaching both native and non-native speakers. I have to respond to texts that contain strings that no mature writer would write. I have tried to show here how the assumption that our knowledge of language (both mine as a teacher and that of my students) has both a competence and performance distinction informs my responses. I suspect that those who deny the competence-performance distinction respond to texts differently. I'm trying to figure what the differences are to evaluate which view of language is more helpful to me as a teacher. Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/