AN OVERVIEW OF APPROACHES AND METHODS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

ORDER OF AQUISITION AND DEVELOPMENTAL READINESS

-Seminar paper-

Student: Marko indeli Index no. 090213

THE FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY AND ARTS UNIVERSITY OF KRAGUJEVAC

Order of Acquisition and Developmental Readiness

Introduction
Studies concerning natural order are very important for determining order in which certain morphemes of a language are acquired by the speakers. Some of the first researches were done in the 1970s and 1980s when linguists were mainly trying to uncover the evidence which would support the innatist theory about language acquisition. One of the most influential men in this field of study was Stephen Krashen who, in 1980s, proposed 5 hypothesis, regarding the second language acquisition, which were known as the Monitor model. The one relevant for the order of acquisition is the natural order hypothesis in which he stated that certain grammatical structures are acquired earlier than others. Guided by these theories, researchers were prone to conduct quite a number of studies dealing with order of the first language acquisition and the second language acquisition. Most results of the researches led to a conclusion that the first language acquisition and second language acquisition were not at all random processes but rather that they were a systematic one, and what was more surprising was that the course of acquisition of first and second language was almost identical even thou it varied in some minor aspects.

Development and Research in L1 and L2 Acquisition

It is known that children start to develop language skills simultaneously with other skills such as cognition, socialization, communication and motor skills, and on the other hand when adults acquire second language they already have cognitive skills developed but some communicative and social routines may develop concurrently when second language acquisition is taken into the account. There are two main ways of studying language acquisition. We have longitudinal studies which take a serious amount of time and devotion and they show how the language is developed over a period of time and are primarily used for the first language acquisition. The length of these studies is not a constant but it depends on the resources which are available to the study and also the participants who are involved in it. The other type of studies are crosssectional studies which are more convenient for second language acquisition research since

the longitudinal studies, although more informative, are harder to conduct because some of the learners might leave the program before the study is finished. The cross-sectional studies are concerned with investigating language acquisition by learners who are of different proficiency levels and then work on the presumption that what is observed reflects the development of language acquisition over a period of time. In 1973 R. Brown was one of the pioneer researchers in the field of language acquisition. Namely, he conducted a research regarding the order in which morphemes of the first language were acquired by three children who were native speakers of American English. Two of them, Adam and Sarah were 27 months old, and another one, Eve, was 18 months old, at the beginning of the study. The length of the study varied, Eve participated for about a year and Adam and Sarah were involved in the study for four years. Since Brown had an opportunity to commit sufficient amount of time to this research he managed to chart the order in which 14 English language morphemes, in the first language acquisition, were acquired. (Table 1.1) Table 1.1 Order of acquisition of 14 morphemes for English L1 (Brown,1973: 278) Morpheme 1 Present progressive 2 3 Prepositions 4 Plural 5 Past irregular 6 Possessive 7 Uncontractible copula 8 Articles 9 Past regular 10 Third person regular 11 Third person irregular 12 Unocntractible auxiliary 13 Contractible copula 14 Contractible auxiliary Example +ing in/on noun + s went, swam hers she was good the, a looked, talked she talks she has she was talking she's good she's talking

Before Brown (1973) published his findings there was another research done by de Villiers and de Villiers (1973), already in motion. In contrast to Browns longitudinal study in which he observed only three children, de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) conducted a crosssectional study of 21 children from whom they elicited L11 spontaneous speech data and then
1

L1 mother tongue; first language

compared the accuracy order they obtained with Browns findings. The final analysis of the material produced very similar results to one which Brown originally published. One of the studies that succeeded Browns (1973) was the comparative study of the first language acquisition of Spanish and Catalan morphemes (Aparici, Diaz, & Cortes, 1996; Serra et al., 2000: 323)The table 1.2 shows the results of their research. Although those results differed from Browns (1973) hence he conducted the research of acquisition of English language morphemes, they showed that the order of acquisition of morphemes was very similar to closely related languages. This was yet another evidence that the language acquisition was not a non-systematic process. Table 1.2 The order of L1 acquisition of Catalan and Spanish

Morpheme
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Catalan

Spanish

First and third person singular, verb X X Third person plural X Gender X X Plural X X Article X X Infinitive, present and present perfect X X a (locative preposition) X X Reflexive pronoun X X First person weak pronoun First person singular possessive X Note. X means that a morpheme was acquired in the language by at least two of the three children. When second language order of acquisition is considered, there have been multiple

studies conducted in this field where findings surprisingly resembled the findings of Brown (1973) and de Villiers and de Villiers (1973). What amazed the linguists even more was the fact that the order of acquisition of English morphemes did not depend of the learners first language. Dulay and Burt (1973) did a research on three groups of L1 Spanish children learners of English language and found consistency in the order of acquisition of the English language morphemes. Both authors expanded their research (1974b) to a two different L1 groups of English language learners, Spanish and Chinese, only to come up with the same conclusions as before. Some later studies also proved that the acquisition of morphemes was not different for different age groups of students. Table 1.3 shows the order of second language acquisition for adult and children learners.

Morpheme
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Pronoun case nominative (I) / accusative (me) Progressive (V + ing) Contractible copula Plural (-s) Article (the, a) Contractible auxiliary (shes talking) Past irregular (went, swam) Possessive (s, girls) Third person (s, runs) Long plural (syllabic, -es, runs) Table 1.3 Adult and child L22 morpheme order (Bailey, Madden, & Krashen, 1974; Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982) Regardless the fact that these morpheme studies together with methods that were used to conduct them were criticized by many scientists they provided undeniable evidence crucial for understanding the first language acquisition and the second language acquisition altogether with learning processes of language, in general. These resulting facts would later be a valuable starting point in improvement of the teaching methods used for the second language, whether that language is English or any other.

Acquisition of Tense and Aspect

In the first part of the paper we reviewed some of the earlier studies of the language acquisition which werent focused on any particular grammatical theme. Some more modern researches were focused on a singular grammatical aspect and the way of how learners tend to understand and acquire them. Now, we shall investigate how learners acquire the tense-aspect system and see how the study of acquisition provides facts about learners ability to mark temporal and aspectual information, how they relate form and function and it will also give us a glimpse into comparison between first language acquisition and the second language acquisition. It is only logical that learners must have a good grasp of tense-aspect reference system of the target language to be able to express themselves with accuracy and proficiency. Each language consists of way of expressing tense and aspect that dont just effect verbs; there are also other linguistic means which could be regarded as tense markers such as adverbs of time
2

L2 target language; second language

like: today, yesterday, tomorrow, now, etc. Both aspect and tense of a verb are considered temporal markers but expressed in different ways. In English language the utterances Ben ran and Ben was running have the past time reference but a different aspect while the utterance Ben runs differs from the utterance Ben ran only in the matter of tense. Investigations of how tenses and aspects were acquired when second language acquisition is taken into consideration led linguists to conclusion that there were three stages of acquisition. First stage was the pragmatic stage in which learners would depend on the interlocutors turns which may provide learners with a time frame and also on universal principles that something is being told in the chronological order. Next stage is the lexical stage when learners start to use adverbial concerning time and also connectives such as: and, then, etc. in order to indicate time. The last stage is the morphological stage in which learners use tense to indicate temporal relations. The morphological stage itself consists of several other stages. For English language the sequence of past tenses is the following: simple past > past progressive > present perfect > past perfect, while for the future is: will + inf > going to > present progressive or simple present. Of course, these sequences are not absolute and learners tend to acquire some of them simultaneously; however; these sequences give us a general outline in which most learners acquire tense system of the English language. There have been also other approaches that observed the morphological aspect of acquisition which theorised that if one adopts a tense morpheme would be able to use it with all the verbs but some studies of the acquisition of perfective and imperfective morphemes in Romance languages suggested that that was not the case. Observations indicated that certain verbs were more often used with perfect and others with imperfect tense. Namely, the verbs which suggest the on-going activity were mainly used with progressive or imperfect morphology while the verbs with instinct endpoints were rather used with simple past in English language or preterit in Romance languages. This categorization that assumes also the lexical meaning of the verb is formulated in the aspect hypothesis.

Readiness
In linguistic sense readiness refer to whether the learner is ready to acquire a certain language concept and to be able to process the constraints which represent the prerequisite knowledge about the language to be able to acquire it.

Pienemann made a hypothesis which primary factor was the readiness it is also known as Pienemanns multidimensional model and teachability hypothesis (Pienemann, 1998). This hypothesis states that: 1. developmental sequences are motivated by processing constraints 2. the learners linguistic behavior may vary according to socio-psychological factors 3. the acquisition of specific forms via instructions will only be effective if the learner is ready for it. From this point of view these stages are connected to the learners strategies in processing the language as they acquire it. Learners pass through three main stages of this development 1. canonical order 2. initialization / finalization 3. subordinate clause

Instruction
It is shown that the instruction plays a very important part in the second language acquisition and the tense-aspect system is no exception to this rule. Method in which the second language is though has a high effect on how much of the target language will be acquired. But, instruction cannot change the acquisition sequence nor it can help students to skip stages. Studies have shown that even though the classroom instructions frequently focus on pure tense-aspect morphology, the students seem to exhibit both the pragmatic and the lexical stages of temporal expression. For example, if the going to and will +inf were thought together as form of expressing future the students tend to use the going to construction more scarcely than the will +inf construction.

Conclusion
Since R. Brown up to the date many scientist were trying to unravel the mysteries of how people acquire language, how they relate form with the meaning, etc. This paper presented some of the findings in the field of first language and the second language acquisition research which proved that acquisition was not just a haphazard process but very well organized system. This evidence will surely provide an important material for future

development of second language teaching methods and deepen the understanding of how the human brain functions and produces sentences, utterances, and other language concepts that we daily use in communication with others. It was also presented that there isnt only one singular factor that regards to language acquisition but that there is a multitude of factors and each one must be taken into the account.

References
Brown, Roger (1973). A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kwon, Eun-Young (2005): The Natural Order of Morpheme Acquisition: A Historical Survey Teachers College, Columbia University Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, Vol. 5, No. 1 Krashen, Stephen (1982) The Principles and Practice of Second Language Acquisition, University of Southern California Spolsky, Bernard and Francis M. Hult (eds.) (2007) The Handbook of Educational Linguistics, Blackwell Publishing