Developmental patterns: Order

and sequence in SLA

 Do learners acquire
some target-language
features before
others?
How do learners acquire a
particular tl linguistic
feature?

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 Chapter 3: Part 1
1. Methods for Investigating Developmental
Patterns
2. Developmental patterns in L1 Acquisition
3. Developmental Patters in SLA
The Early Stages
The Silent Period
Formulaic Speech
Structural and Semantic Simplification

4. The Morpheme Studies

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 1.
Methods for Investigating dev’t
patterns

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 Different ways on how researchers identify
Developmental Patterns

Error Analysis
✘ One of the first methods used to
investigate learner language
✘ A comparison between the errors
made in the target language and that
target language itself.
✘ Provides strong support for remedial
teaching.
WEAKNESS:
Methodological problems and limitations
in the scope of EA.

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 Obligatory Occasion Analysis
✘ (Brown 1973)
✘ Widely used by L2 researchers
✘ Collects occurring learner language (utterances) that identifies data
which is calculated

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 TARGET-LIKE USE ANALYSIS
Teresa pica (1983)
✘ concerned with how learners perform particular features of a
language
✘ mostly associated with morpheme studies and acquisition orders

✘ Number of obligatory context + number of incorrect suppliances in

non-obligatory context

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 But according to bley-vroman (1983)
✘ Comparative Fallacy – misleading comparisson
✘ Learners have their own unique rule systems in learning L2
✘ Target-language based analyses CANNOT DESCRIBE THESE
LANGUAGE LEARNING SYSTEMS

✘ “THE COMPARATIVE FALLACY IN INTERLANGUAGE STUDIES:

THE CASE OF SYSTEMATICITY’

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 FREQUENCY ANALYSIS

✘ catalogues the various linguistic devices that learners use

✘ calculate the frequency with which each device was used at different
points of the learner’s dev’t.
✘ one of the best ways of examining developmental sequences.

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Some researches are..
✘ Longitudinal ✘ Cross-sectional
- takes weeks, months, or even -data were collected only at a
years single point in time
 Implicational Scaling Technique
(Decamp 1971)
✘ Establishes order of acquisition for cross-sectional data
✘ Different features acquired by different learners arranged into a hierarchy
✘ set of lexical items that are of the same constituent category, and
ordered in terms of their informativeness.

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 Links:
✘ Error Analysis - http://www.tesolclass.com/applying-sla-
theories/error-analysis/
✘ Obligatory Occasion Analysis -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQPGMG6XWyg
✘ Frequency Analysis -
https://youtu.be/24Y5w9sAOzI?list=PL6B445216E3B93D2C
✘ Implicational Scaling Technique -

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 2.
Developmental patterns in L1
Acquisition

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 Importance of L1 dev’t patterns
1. Provided L2 researchers with useful methodological procedures
for investigating dev’t patterns in learner language.
2. L1 order and sequence serve as a BASELINE for L2 acquisition
order and sequence

Issue: “Are the two types of acquisition the same or different?”

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 L1 Acquisition Researches
1960s and 1970s
 Detailed case studies of individual
learners based on speech (McNeil
1970; Slobin 1970; Brown 1973)
 Cross-sectional studies of large
numbers of learners (de Villiers and
de Villiers 1973)
 Experimental studies of children’s
comprehension and production of
linguistic features (Berko 1958;
Chomsky 1969)
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1980s and 1990s
 SHARP tradition (Atkinson 1986)
- The empirical study of L1
acquisition
 The Longitudinal study, Bristol
Study “Language at Home and at
School” (Wells 1985)
 Enormous cross-linguistic project
(Slobin 1985)
 FLAT – First Language
Acquisition Theories (Atkinson
1980)
 SHARP vs FLAT
Atkinson in the 1980s

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One of the pervasive findings in FLA research:

 CHILDREN FOLLOW A WELL-DEFINED PATTERN OF

DEVELOPMENT

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 Utterances Order of Acquisition
(morphemes)
Ex. One word – two word
“Mama”
“No Kiss”
“Aya Hungry”
“Up Mama up”

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Overgeneralization Negation
Ex. Past Tense – 1. Non presence
“go – goed,” No cookie! – “No more cookies”
“swim – swimmed”
“eat – eated” 2. Rejection
“cut - cutted” No cookie! – “I don’t want a cookie”

3. Denial
No cookie! – “I didn’t take the cookie!”

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 Children are faced with two problems:
Clark and Clark (1977)
✘ “They have to figure out how to map their ideas and general
knowledge onto propositions.”

✘ “ They have to find out how to communicate speech acts and

thematic information along with the propositional content of
their utterances”

MAPPING AND COMMUNICATING GO HAND IN HAND.

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 Clark and Clark also illustrates:

Assertions Commissive
and s
Requests

Directives
Expressives

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 Inter-learner variability
✘ Some learners learn fast, while others do it more slowly

✘ Some children use the analytical strategy (developmental

progression)
✘ Some children use the gestalt strategy (remaining silent for a
long period of time, then speaks in complete sentences afterwards)

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 👶
. Mentalists vs. Behaviorists
Nature vs. Nurture
Theory

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 3.
Developmental Patterns in
SLA

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 The Early Stages

Structural and
The Silent Formulaic
Semantic
Period Speech Simplification

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 The Silent Period
✘ Lengthy period of listening to people to them before they produce their first
words.
Other-directed – interpersonal
focuses on the message being conveyed
Inner – directed – intrapersonal, focuses on language code

✘ Provides learners with opportunities to prepare themselves for social use.

*Private Speech

BUT NOT ALL LEARNERS UNDERGO THROUGH THE SILENT PERIOD.

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 Formulaic Speech
✘ Consists of expressions which are learnt as unanalyzable wholes
and employed on particular occasions (Lyons 1968)
✘ Distinguish routines and patterns to refer to whole utterances
(Hakuna 1976) and (Krashen and Scarcella 1978)
✘ Scripts such as greeting sequences, which the learner can
memorize because its fixed and predictable (Ellis, 1984)

✘ Can I ________?
✘ May I ________?
✘ Hello, Hi
✘ I’m fine, thank you

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 Structural and Semantic Simplification
✘ The learner’s creative utterances consist of just one or two words, with both
grammatical functions and content word missing.
✘ Involves the omission of content words – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

✘ 19-year old Fatmah:

“Library” – He’s in the library
“Clean floor” – Give me something to clean the floor

But according to Corder (1981), you cannot simplify what you do not possess. That
is why it can be misleading to use the word “simplification”

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 4.
The Acqusition of Morphemes:
Order and Sequence
The Morpheme Studies

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In the 1970s,
morpheme studies
- carried out to investigate the order of
acquisition of grammatical functions

“Which morpheme is acquired first?”

 Dulay and Burt (1973-1974)
✘ Investigated Spanish and Chinese children
✘ The acquisition order for a group of English morphemes remained
the same irrespective of the learners’ L1.

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 Bailey, madden, and krashen (1974)
✘ Replicated the previous study with adult learners
✘ SAME RESULT

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 Larsen-freeman (1976)
✘ Adapted a study from Dulay and Bert (1973)
✘ Used learners with a wider range of L1 (Arabic, Spanish,
Japanese)
✘ Used 5 tasks to collect data (picture-cued sentence repetition test,
listening comprehension, writing test, etc)
✘ FOUND SOME DIFFERENCE IN THE ORDERS FOR THE
DIFFERENT TASKS

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DIFFERENT ORDERS EXIST FOR THE ORAL AND
WRITTEN LEARNER LANGUAGE

✘ For speaking and writing are influenced by different socio-linguistic

and psycho-linguistic condition.

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Krashen’s natural order of morpheme acquisition (1977)

✘ proposed a grouping of morphemes with clear

developmental stage
✘ Remarkably similar irrespective of the learners’
language background, age, medium

✘ A different order may occur if the learner gives

importance to forms rather than meaning
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 But…
✘ Rosanksky (1976)
Jorge (Spanish) – did not conform to the “natural order”
✘ Schmidt (1983)
Wes (Japanese) – discrepancies (plural, article, past regular
have low ranks)
✘ Hakuta (1974)
Uguisu (Japanese) – did not match Dulay and Burt’s

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Doubts in the accuracy
order as a basis for
discussing acquisition
For not all learners match the NATURAL ORDER OF L2
Acquisition and the results in the study of Dulay and Bert

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 Criticisms on morpheme studies:
✘ Doubts in using accuracy order as basis for acquisition
✘ Scoring of morphemes
✘ Use of rank order statistics hides meaningful differences
✘ Research has been restricted only to a small set of morphemes
✘ Lacks theoretical motivation

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It still fails to recognize the most serious limitation in the morpheme
studies:
The Conceptualization of Acquisition in terms of ACCUMULATED
ENTITIES

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thanks!

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