Stephen Krashen and The Monitor Hypothesis

Who is Stephen Krashen?

Stephen Krashen is an American linguist and educational researcher, he is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. Krashen is often credited with the development and popularization of The Natural Approach to language learning which has 4 important hypotheses: The Input Hypothesis, The Natural Order Hypothesis, The Affective Filter Hypothesis and The Monitor Hypothesis. Today we are going to look at The Monitor Hypothesis, what it is and what the implications are for language learning and teaching.

What is the Monitor Hypothesis?

The monitor hypothesis is a theory about language learning and the implication of it is that we should try to do less conscious grammar learning and we should do more sub-conscious language acquisition, this basically means absorbing or picking up the language by doing as much reading and listening as possible.

Here's how it works

When we speak our first language we produce the language naturally. So while we speak an idea comes into our head and our brain can express that idea through language without thinking about grammar rules, the process is instantaneous.

I'll give you an example. I'm in the restaurant and the waiter asks me what I would like to eat. I reply, "Can I please have the vegetarian breakfast?"

And when I say that I don't have to monitor my speech by consciously thinking about grammar rules. I don't think, "ok, whats the verb... it's a modal verb: 'can'... Do I use 'to' or do i not use 'to'? I do not use 'to'... do I put the adjective before the noun or after the noun?" I don't think about that at all because I have acquired my first language subconsciously beginning as a baby and throughout my formative years; I was able to learn without consciously focusing on rules. My acquisition was subconscious and therefore my language production is also subconscious.

When we consciously learn grammar by picking up a grammar book and reading about the rules, or having someone teach us the rules and then doing exercises, it activates the monitor system in our brain, this is not a natural way to learn or to speak languages. It means that the idea will come to our mind and we run it through the monitor, we inspect the sentence to see if the grammar is correct and it will take some time before we are able to speak it.

And the problem is that the waiter might not have time to wait for you to produce language in this way.

There are three problems with this approach:

Number one is that you need to know the rule. That means that the rule needs to have been learnt, you need to remember the rule and you need to apply the rule correctly. This is very difficult. And there are easier, and better ways (acquisition rather than learning)

Number two is that you need time to use the monitor. This is where we say that knowledge of grammar theory can actually get in the way of language production for language learners, it becomes more of a hindrance than a help because it slows down your production of the language.

Number three is that consciously learned language only makes up a very small percentage of our language competence. Most of our language competence actually comes from acquired language, vocabulary and grammar that you've read and listened to enough times, you probably know most of your English or second language from listening to your teacher talk, or watching tv series, YouTube videos and listening to podcasts rather than by consciously learning rules. So consciously learned rules can actually get in the way, and their importance should be deemphasized. 

A better way to acquire grammar is to just read and listen to as much language as possible and absorb the grammar subconsciously, then you will be able to produce the language subconsciously, this is especially important for beginner to intermediate language learners, they should do far more subconscious acquisition than conscious learning, and they should not be made to feel like mistakes are bad. Once a student is advanced, it's a much safer position from which to start learning grammar, after, they have done the important work of acquisition.

Does this mean that we should never study grammar?

No, but far less emphasis should be put on it and rules should be acquired before they are learnt, furthermore, it’s not necessary to learn every single rule. In most language classes that I have observed, teachers are asking students to first learn a rule, practice a rule and then, if at all, asked to acquire the rule. I.e. a lot of emphasis and importance is being put on conscious learning and not enough emphasis is being put on natural acquisition (which is more reading and listening), this will increase the monitor effect, it will slow students down and get in the way of their progress.

So what does acquisition look like?

One problem is that there are very few listening and reading resources for students who are elementary to pre-intermediate. Once we get to intermediate we can start using podcasts and magazine articles, but beginner students don’t have much to read other than books designed for 1-3 year olds, these are not very interesting to the average adult learner. One solution to this is TPRS, Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling.. TPRS is basically the process of creating a story with your class using whatever acquired language you have to work with and targeting any vocabulary or language that you would like to build on. You create the story by asking your class questions and building the story together. So for instance if a piece of vocabulary I want to target is the word ‘run’ and I want to target the present simple, I might make a story about a turtle who runs to the supermarket every day to buy lemonade. The story is usually absurd, but students take an active interest in it because you created it together, they remember the details and are often bursting to retell it. Students really enjoy TPRS and it provides them with meaningful comprehensible input, it’s meaningful simply because they created the story with you.

A Summary

The Monitor Hypothesis is a theory of language acquisition by Stephen Krashen which states that grammar and vocabulary should be acquired through reading a listening to enjoyable and meaningful comprehensible input rather than learnt in a rote way. If we have a system of learnt grammar rules in our head and try to produce language by running our writing and speaking through this filter then it confuses the student, takes too much time and gets in the way of spontaneous, anxiety free language production. We call this filter The Monitor. We need to use the monitor less through natural acquisition of language. This means deemphasizing the importance of grammar instruction in the classroom and dramatically deemphasizing the importance of grammar tests.