4.3 ILs exhibit common acquisition orders and developmental sequences
4.3.1 Acquisition order: morpheme studies
Early empirical evidence of that systematicity and of the existence of LI-neutral developmental sequences was provided by the so-called 'morpheme studies', noted in Chapter 3, which established the existence of a common acquisition order for a subset of English grammatical morphemes. Early studies by Dulay and Burt (1973, 1974) found that some 250 Spanish- and Chinese-speaking children, aged six to eight, learning English in the USA, exhibited statistically significantly related orders in speech data elicited using the Bilingual Syntax Measure (BSM).
The finding of a common morpheme order was confirmed, again
using the BSM, for 73 Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking instructed adults by Bailey, Madden and Krashen (1974), who also showed that the ESL order differed from that obtained for English L1 in a longitudinal study of three children by Brown (1973) and a cross-sectional study of 24 children by de Villiers and de Villiers (1973).
Dulay and Burt had already found the child ESL order different from the L1 order.
In another large-scale study conducted during this period, LarsenFreeman (1975a) tested 24 adults, six speakers each from four LI backgrounds (Arabic, Spanish, Japanese and Farsi), twice over a six-month period, using five tasks: the BSM, a picture-cued sentence-repetition test, a listening comprehension test (identifying one picture from a set on the basis of a spoken sentence), a modified reading cloze passage (with multiple-choice answers), and a writing test consisting
of the same passage, but this time with the subjects filling in the blanks without the multiple-choice items. Larsen-Freeman found statistically significantly similar 'accuracy' orders6 across L1 groups, and between her listening, BSM and repetition tasks and Dulay and Burt's BSM order, but some differences between these orders and those she obtained for her reading and writing tasks. Certain items rose in accuracy rank on those two tasks, notably plural s and third-person s, thereby 'disturbing' the order that was becoming familiar.
While contrastive analysis of the Lis represented in her sample showed that LI transfer could not explain the orders obtained, Larsen-Freeman did find some effect for LI, e.g. the low rank for article in the Japanese order. (For similar findings with children, see Mace-Matluck 1977.) In a subsequent study, Larsen-Freeman (1976c) suggested that input frequency might be one factor influencing the order, although not the only factor, of course; articles, for example, are always the most frequent item in the input, but relatively low in the accuracy order.
Reviewing over a dozen ESL morpheme studies available at the time, Krashen (1977) postulated a 'natural order' supported, with few exceptions, by the longitudinal and cross-sectional, individual and grouped SL findings (Figure 4.1). No claims were made for the order of items within a box, but items in boxes higher in the order were regularly found (80 or 90 per cent) accurately supplied in obligatory contexts (SOC) before those in boxes lower in the order.
While admittedly not rigidly invariant, Krashen (1977, p.
151) pointed out, the order was also far from random.
Criticisms of the methodology utilized in these and
Long and Sato 1984). Not all were well founded. A suggestion, for example, that
the order was simply an artefact of the BSM (Porter 1977) was easily refuted by Larsen-Freeman's data, by a study by Krashen, Houck, Giunchi, Bode, Birnbaum and Strei (1977), which obtained the same order from the spontaneous speech of 22 'intermediate' adult ESL students from various LI backgrounds, and by studies obtaining the same order using adult free-composition data (Houk, Robertson and Krashen 1978; Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum and Robertson 1978).
FIGURE 4.1Krashen's (1977) 'Natural Order' for ESL
A claim by Rosansky (1976) that the order could only be sustained in aggregated, cross-sectional, group data, and that it was contradicted by longitudinal data on individuals, was also refuted. Krashen (1977) showed that for all studies with
individual subjects as well as with groups, in which at least ten obligatory contexts per morpheme were included, the 'natural order' held. Using fewer than ten obligatory contexts as Rosansky had done tends to produce unreliable results, as a change of just one extra correct suppliance of a morpheme means a change of more than 10 per cent on a subject's score for that item. Rosansky was undoubtedly correct in positing variability at the level of the individual. Nevertheless, Andersen (1978) showed that individual and grouped morpheme data do, in fact, correlate significantly.
Some other criticisms, however, clearly were more problematic for those wishing to base any strong claims on the findings of the morpheme studies. First, given the 'weak' nature of the inferential statistical tests employed (Spearman or Kendall rank order correlations), showing that orders were statistically significantly related could, and often did, still mean that they differed in significant ways, too (J.D. Brown 1983). Second, very few grammatical items were common to a majority of the studies, meaning that any claims concerning common orders were based on a tiny portion of English grammar (just nine items in Krashen's order, for instance). By definition, they were also language-specific, precluding cross-linguistic generalizations. If they showed anything, in other words, it was likely to be something about ESL, not SLA. And finally, the order, common or not, consisted of a linguistically heterogeneous group of bound and free NP and VP morphemes, which are in fact more revealing of developmental patterns when analysed in subsets, e.g.
analysing the subset of morphemes having to do with noun phrases (Krashen 1977; Andersen 1978; J.D. Brown 1983).
Lacking any theoretical motivation, the order was itself in need of explanation (Gregg 1984). Several factors suggested as potential explanations, semantic and syntactic complexity, perceptual saliency, functional transparency and others, may well play a role, but only input frequency has much empirical support to date (Larsen-Freeman 1976c; Long 1980a;
Lightbown 1983; Long and Sato 1983; for review, see Hatch 1983, Chapter 3). Another possibility is that suggested by Clahsen, Meisel and Pienemann (1983) and Pienemann andjohnston (1985), namely that the structures of any language, not just ESL, are learned as permitted by a series of underlying processing constraints (for discussion, seeChapter 7). The universality of the constraints potentially explains the commonalities across learners of both the morpheme accuracy/acquisition order and developmental sequences.
The early work reported here was by no means the end of the story. At least fifty SL morpheme studies have now been reported, many using more sophisticated data collection and analysis procedures, notably target-like use (TLU) analysis, in which subjects' performance in supplying morphemes in non-obligatory contexts in addition to SOC is scrutinized (see, e.g., Lightbown, Spada and Wallace 1980; Lightbown 1983; and for review, Pica 1983c). Importantly, Pica (1982) showed that SOC and TLU orders calculated for the same corpus correlated statistically significandy, thus helping allay some of the fears about the earlier findings. Other researchers have extended
the range of subjects sampled, finding orders correlating significandy with those from the earlier studies with subjects from Indo-European and non-Indo-European LI backgrounds (Mace-Matluck 1977; Fuller 1978), on different performance tasks, e.g. Fathman's SLOPE test (Krashen, Sferlazza,
Feldman and Fathman 1976), and in different (foreign language and second language) acquisition contexts (Fathman 1978; Makino 1979; cf. Sajavaara 1981). Finally, a small number of studies have appeared documenting accuracy orders for other L2s, e.g. Spanish (van Naerssen 1980, 1986) and Quiche Mayan (Bye 1980).
In sum, despite admitted limitations in some areas, the morpheme studies provide strong evidence that ILs exhibit common accuracy/acquisition orders. Contrary to what some critics have alleged, there are in our view too many studies conducted with sufficient methodological rigour and showing sufficiently consistent general findings for the commonalities to be ignored. As the hunter put it, 'There is something moving in the bushes.'