Qamar Aftab BS English 3rd Semester

1. What does development look like?

There are three principal characteristics of development in SLA. One
is that there is a stage like development, particularly in the realm of
sentence structure. The second characteristic is ordered development.
And within a stage of development of the acquisition of particular
linguistic feature, there can be variation.

 Stage-like development:
Staged development in SLA has been introduced since the early
days (1970s) of contemporary research. Stages (also called
developmental sequences) have been found for negation,
question formation, and other sentence structures in English.
One of the most well-known developmental sequences is negation
in English. The stages are as follows:

 Negation external to the sentence (e.g., no + X)

No drink beer. No you eat that.
 Negation moves inside the sentence (e.g., S + no + X);
‘don’t’ appears as an alternate of ‘no’ I no can do these. I don’t
can do these.
 Appearance of modals and attachment of negation
I can’t do that one. Use of (with are is can)
 Using auxiliary verbs with ‘not’ that agree with tense,
person and number.

U-shaped behavior:
Some staged development obeys U-shaped behavior (see U-
shaped acquisition). U-shaped behavior occurs when a learner
produces something correctly, then begins to produce that same
thing incorrectly (usually due to learning something else), and
then regains the ability to produce that thing correctly. The classic

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Qamar Aftab BS English 3rd Semester

example comes from irregular past tenses. In the beginning,

learners produce highly frequent irregular past tense forms such
as went and ate. In the next stage, they begin to produce incorrect
irregulars because of (unconscious) influence from regular past
tense forms: wented/goed, eated/ated. Subsequently, they
reacquire the correct irregulars.

Ordered Development:
In addition to stages of particular structures, there also
exists what are called acquisition orders. While staged
development refers to the acquisition of one particular
structure, acquisition orders are concerned with the
relative order in which different structures are acquired
over time.
For English verbal inflections, the following acquisition
order is firmly attested:
 progressive -ing;
 regular past tense;
 irregular past tense;
 Third-person –s.
This acquisition order means that learners first gain
accuracy with -ing, then gain accuracy with regular past
tense, then gain accuracy with irregular past tense, and
gain accuracy last with third-person -s.

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Qamar Aftab BS English 3rd Semester

Variation and variability:

As learners enter a stage of development or begin to
acquire a new morpheme or formal feature of language,
they may demonstrate variable performance. Researchers
have posited two kinds of variation: free and systematic.
Free variation refers to the seemingly random use of two
or more formal features to perform the same linguistic
function. For example, a learner might use No look my
card and don’t look my card to perform the function of
telling someone to keep his eyes to himself (the example
comes from Rod Ellis’s work).
Although it has been documented in learner speech, free
variation does not seem to play a major role in production
and generally seems to disappear as learners’ L2 systems
develop and organize. That is, free variation might be
fleetingly transitional as the learner enters a new stage of
development.
The source of systematic variation has been debated,
with scholars examining everything from task-induced
variation to context related variation. Some approaches
have taken a multifactor analysis, with promising results.
Unfortunately, variability is not nearly as studied as it was
in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The thrust of
SLA research has been directed toward other aspects of
learner language.

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