Comparative Essay " Krashen And Chomsky's Theories On Language Acquisition"

This essay will compare and contrast several language acquisition theories. Specifically it will be about the theories of two famous researchers, Noam Chomsky and Stephen Krashen. Answering a question, How human language is acquired?

First of all, Noam Chomsky is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is considered the “Father of modern Linguistics” and he proposed Universal Grammar Theory (UG). The humans are born with the ability for acquiring language, thought of the constant interaction with other people. Also children are receptive to the common characteristics of different languages, because they are born with a Universal Grammar.

On the other hand, Stephen Krashen is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, he wrote around of 350 Books and Papers Published since 1974 and he proposed 5 Theories of Second Language Acquisition. He illustrates that language acquisition is a subconscious process that does not require use of grammatical rules (Linguistics, 2009). Related to this, children are not concentrated in the structure of their sentences, but in the communicative perform.

For understand better, Krashen studies the different stages and processes of a child when acquiring a language and a leaner when learning a target language. In contrast, Chomsky centers his attention to the different processes occurred in the mind while we learn a language. He is most concerned in the knowledge of the language.

In Chomsky's view, the innate knowledge is represented by a ''little black box'' in the brain, which is called language acquisition device (Brown, 2007). For instance, a child does not spend its early years repeating words or phrases, but in identifying grammar variations to construct new sentences. In consequence, the child is always forming hypotheses of the input received, and as the child's language develops, those assumptions are constantly corrected, reestablished or sometimes removed (Brown, 2007). Hence the process of language acquisition depends on the contact that the speaker has with the environment, due to the fact that infants develop the capacity to understand language and they expand this innate ability through time.

At the same time, Krashen illustrates that language acquisition is a subconscious process that does not require use of grammatical rules (Lingtechguistics, 2009). Related to this, children are not concentrated in the structure of their sentences, but in the communicative perform. A particular example of this process could be the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, where the syntactic order of a sentence includes the noun followed by the adjective, while English speakers pronounce the adjective before the noun. However, even these differences in grammar or syntax could be ignored by the learner, because they will understand them as a normal component of the language to which they are becoming exposed (Krashen, 2009). As a result, Krashen’s model is compare with the acquisition of a first language, which includes factors such as motivation, self-confidence and low level of anxiety that contribute to the learner success. Thus Stephen Krashen's theory is very similar to Chomsky's assumption in terms of language acquisition, in view of the fact that these authors propose that language is naturally obtained.

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

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