Learning Spanish Part Twenty-four: The Acquisition-learning Hypothesis

Dr. Stephen Krashen’s foundational principle in his theory of Second Language Acquisition is called “The Acquisition-Learning hypothesis.” In this idea, a distinction is made in that wonderfully exciting and gaiety-galore world of linguistics and language pedagogy between learning a language and acquiring it.

“The acquired system” is the means through which spoken fluency is acquired.

I can recall scores of students who come to Guanajuato, Mexico (where we live), who have told me they would pay any amount of money to have the spoken fluency of a Mexican child being packed off to his or her first day of class in primary school. It is, after all, what most of those with whom I’ve spoken are afterspoken fluency. Sure, they would love to read and write in Spanish but they seem to have an instinctive understanding of what comes first. They know the cart does not draw the horse. They are after the horse and then the cart.

To acquire the target language is the result of a process almost identical to what we all went through in acquiring our native languages. This process is a natural event in which the learner of the language is...