1. Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción.
Facultad de Educación.
Pedagogía en Educación Media en Inglés.
“Comparative essay. Comparing Krashen and Chomsky`s
approaches on language acquisition”.
Iris Roa.
English learning and acquisition.
Juan Castro.
Maria Lagos.
Concepción, April 17th
2014.

2. This essay serves as a summary of several theories on language acquisition. It
is meant to be used as a source to compare the point of view of some authors that
have an own approach about this topic. The main objective is to analyse Stephen
Krashen and Noam Chomsky`s studies about the language acquisition, but it has an
orientation firstly to establish a relationship or similarity between the Nativist
approach by Chomsky and krashen´s five hypotheses about language acquisition
and learning. Moreover, a contrast is made about the importance that both authors
give to input in the language acquisition process.
It is known that Chomsky proposed in his theory “The Nativist Approach” that the
innate knowledge of languages is in a metaphorical box in the brain. He called it
Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (Chomsky, 1965, as cited in Brown, 2007).
Chomsky went into details on his theory about innate knowledge of languages,
discovering different processes that all human beings go through when they are
acquiring a language. For instance, pivot grammar that was the name that Chomsky
gave to the early grammar that children used in their speech. Furthermore, his
investigations about children’s grammar showed that kid’s first two-word sentences
usually were made by two different word classes. This meant that children were able
to produce meaningful utterances, even though if these ones contained just two
words. Besides Chomsky, Berko (Jean Berko 1958, as cited in Brown 2007) not only
discovered that four year-old children were able to make use of plural form rules,
present progressive, past tense, third person singular and possessives, but also she
proved it using a nonsense-word test where children related a draw name “wug” and
then they added the “s” at the end of “wug” when they saw two “wugs”.
As well as Chomsky proposed on his “Nativist Approach”, Stephen Krashen
stipulated five hypotheses in which he stated the process of acquiring and learning a
second language. Similarly to Chomsky’s innate knowledge, Krashen suggest that
the “Natural Order Hypothesis”, where he declares that human beings acquired some
grammatical aspects of the language before than others (Krashen, 1981, as cited in
Brown, 2007). Krashen suggests that the order in which we learn a second language
is similar to the order of the first language acquisition; also he says that this order
seemed to be independent of the learner’s age, mother tongue background,

3. conditions of exposure. Therefore, this theory stated that there are some grammatical
structures that are easier to acquire than others, progressive form (ing) and plural
form (s) are the first rules to be acquired, and third person singular (s) and the
possessive (‘s) usually are learned later, to name but a few (De Villiers, P. and De
Villiers, J. 1973, as cited in Krashen 2009).
On the other hand, a contrast can be made on the principles that these authors have
about language acquisition. Krashen states that there is only one way in which we
can acquire language and this occurs when we understand the message. This
means when we get a "comprehensible input”. (Krashen, 2003, as cited in Repová,
2004) in this sense we can interpret that to Krashen acquisition happens when
human beings are exposed to communication with others, where the focus is on
meaning. This suggests that the contact that children must have with language is
crucial in order to acquire it, because if we do not understand the meaning of the
message given to us, probably we will not be able to produce grammatical structures
by ourselves. To strengthen his postulated, Krashen states that listening
comprehension and reading are of primary importance subtracting importance to
ability to speak or write because the most important is the input. (Krashen, 2003, as
cited in Repová, 2004).
In contrast to this theory, it can be seen that Chomsky’s point of view is about
language acquisition and the influence of external actors in this process. For
Chomsky, language acquisition is not a process that develops with experience,
because for this linguist language is innate. Specifically, it refers to the general form
of the grammar. (Chomsky, n.d., as cited in Putnam, n.d.). Chomsky states that
children learn when semantic information needs only to "provide motivation for the
language learning process" and not to develop formal language grammar. (Chomsky,
n.d., as cited in Putnam, n.d). If this arguments are analyzed it can be can inferred
that for Chomsky the relationship between language development and the external
contribution is very small, since the impact of the experience is not relevant for him,
and the most important is the development of the internal brain machine (LAD)

4. To conclude this essay, differences and similarities between Chomsky theory and
Krashen theories can be clearly indentified. Both linguists made an important
contribution in terms of language acquisition. Even though they saw language
acquisition from different points of view, for example Krashen’s hypothesis were
based more on social factors, such us the input that is provided by people around
learners environment, and Chomsky’s theory was based mostly on innate knowledge,
and both agreed that there is a kind of device where the knowledge is inside.

5. References
Brown, D. (2007). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Pearson
Education Inc: United States.
Krashen, S. (Ed.). (2009). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition.
Retrieved April, 14, 2014 from
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf.
Repová, K. (2004). Testing Krashen's Input Hypothesis: A Case Study in a Male
Czech Adult Acquiring English. Retrieved April, 14 2014 from
is.muni.cz/th/14768/ff_m/text.pdf
Putnam, H. (n.d.). The “innateness hypothesis” and explanatory models in linguistics.
Retrieved April, 15 2014from http://noam-chomsky.org/onchomsky/196701--.pdf