Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

1 Plural ‘-s’. The easiest morpheme for them was the plural ‘-s’, getting ‘Girls go’.
2 Progressive ‘-ing’. Next easiest was the word ending ‘-ing’ in present continuous
forms like ‘going’, ‘Girls going’.
3 Copula forms of ‘be’. Next came the use of ‘be’ as a copula, that is, as a main verb
in the sentence (‘John is happy’) rather than as an auxiliary used with another
verb (‘John is going’). Changing the sentence slightly gets ‘Girls are here’.
4 Auxiliary form of ‘be’. After this came the auxiliary forms of ‘be’ with ‘-ing’,
yielding ‘Girls are going’.
5 Definite and indefinite articles ‘the’ and ‘a’. Next in difficulty came the definite
and indefinite articles ‘the’ and ‘a’, enabling the learners to produce ‘The girls
go’ or ‘A girl go’.
6 Irregular past tense. Next were the irregular English past tenses such as ‘came’
and ‘went’, that is, those verbs that do not have an ‘-ed’ ending pronounced in
the usual three ways /
d
/, /
t
/ or /
id
/, ‘played’, ‘learnt’ and ‘waited’, as in ‘The
girls went’.
7 Third person ‘-s’. Next came the third person ‘-s’ used with verbs, as in ‘The girl
goes’.
Learning and teaching different types of grammar
26
Content words
Structure words
are in the dictionary: ‘book’
are in the grammar: ‘the’
exist in large numbers, 615,000 in the 
are limited in number, say, 220 in 
Oxford English Dictionary
English
vary in frequency: ‘book’ versus ‘honved’ are high frequency: ‘to’, ‘the’, ‘I’
are used more in written language
are used more in spoken language
are more likely to be preceded by a 
are less likely to be preceded by a pause
pause in speech
in speech
consist of nouns ‘glass’; verbs ‘move’; 
consist of prepositions ‘to’; articles ‘a’;
adjectives ‘glossy’, etc.
pronouns ‘he’, etc.
are always pronounced and spelt the 
vary in pronunciation for emphasis, 
same: ‘look’ /
lυk/
etc.: ‘have’ /h
v, hɘv, ɘv, v/
have a fixed stress or stresses: ‘pilot’
are stressed for emphasis, etc.: ‘the’ 
/
ði ~ ðɘ/
have more than two letters: ‘eye’, ‘Ann’
can consist of one or two letters: ‘I’, ‘an’
are pronounced with an initial voiceless 
are pronounced with an initial voiced
‘th’: ‘theory’ /
θ/
‘th’: ‘there’ /
ð/
can always be invented: ‘cyberpunk’
can seldom be invented
Table 2.1 Content words and structure words

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8 Possessive ‘’s’. Most difficult of the eight endings was the ‘’s’ ending used with
nouns to show possession, as in ‘The girl’s book’.
The sequence from 1 to 8 mirrors the order of difficulty for the L2 learners
Dulay and Burt studied. They had least difficulty with plural ‘-s’ and most diffi-
culty with possessive ‘’s’. The interesting discovery was the similarities between
the L2 learners. It was not just Spanish-speaking children who have a sequence of
difficulty for the eight grammatical morphemes. Similar orders have been found
for Japanese children and for Korean adults (Makino, 1980; Lee, 1981), though
not for one Japanese child (Hakuta, 1974). The first language does not seem to
make a crucial difference: all L2 learners have much the same order. This was quite
surprising in that people had thought that the main problem in acquiring gram-
mar was transfer from the first language; now it turned out that learners had the
same types of mistake whatever the first language they spoke. The other surprise
was that it did not seem to matter if the learners were children or adults; adults
have roughly the same order as children (Krashen et al., 1976). It does not even
make much difference whether or not they are attending a language class (Larsen-
Freeman, 1976). There is a strong similarity between all L2 learners of English,
whatever the explanation may be. This research with grammatical morphemes
was the first to demonstrate the common factors of L2 learners so clearly.
While grammatical morphemes petered out as a topic of research in the 1990s,
it was the precursor of much research to do with the acquisition of grammatical
inflections such as past tense ‘-ed’ which is still common today. Yet there are still
things to learn from this area. Muhammad Hannan (2004), for instance, used it to
find a sequence of acquisition for Bengali-speaking children in East London, as
mentioned in Chapter 1. At the age of 5, they knew only ‘-ing’, as in ‘looking’; by
6 they had added past tense /
t
/ ‘looked’; by 7 irregular past tenses such as ‘went’,
and regular /
d
/ ‘played’; by 8 past participles ‘-en’ ‘been’; by 9 the only persistent
problem was with ‘zero’ past ‘hit’. Clearly these children made a consistent pro-
gression for grammatical morphemes over time.
This type of research brought important confirmation of the idea of the
learner’s independent language, interlanguage. Learners from many backgrounds
seemed to be creating the same kind of grammar for English out of what they
heard, and were passing through more or less the same stages of acquisition. They
were reacting in the same way to the shared experience of learning English. While
the first language made some difference, its influence was dwarfed by what the
learners had in common. Indeed, at one point Dulay and Burt (1973) dramatically
claimed that only 3 per cent of learners’ errors could be attributed to interference
from the first language. While later research has seldom found such a low inci-
dence, nevertheless it became clear that much of the learning of a second lan-
guage was common to all L2 learners rather than being simply transfer from their
first language.
One of the best demonstrations of the independence of interlanguage came
from a research programme that investigated the acquisition of five second lan-
guages by adult migrant workers in Europe, known as the ESF (European Science
Foundation) project. Researchers found a basic grammar that all L2 learners
shared, which had three simple rules; a sentence may consist of:
●
a noun phrase followed by a verb, optionally followed by another noun phrase
‘girl take bread’;
Structure words, morphemes and sequences of acquisition 27

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L2 learners not only have an interlanguage grammar, they have the same interlan-
guage grammar, regardless of the language they are learning. In other words, all
that teachers can actually expect from learners after a year or so is a sparse gram-
mar having these three rules; whatever the teacher may try to do, this may be
what the learners achieve.