| Chapter 1: | The Problem |
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It is generally the case that learners cannot reach a later stage if they have not passed through the previous stage(s) (R. Ellis, 1989; Pavesi, 1986). As a result, successful learning of a second language can only be accomplished by following the natural developmental sequences rather than violating their orders. This characteristic of second language acquisition (SLA) is best captured in Pienemann’s (1984) Teachability hypothesis, which expounded that “an L2 structure can be learnt from instruction only if the learner’s interlanguage (IL) is close to the point when this structure is acquired in the natural setting” (p. 201). In other words, L2 learners have to be prepared and ready for the new rule, and ready in the sense that they are at a stage where all the required preceding rules have already been learned or acquired.
The investigation of acquisition sequences in the learner’s language has been motivated by the desire to describe the learner language in its own right, as a system of rules that learners constructed and repeatedly revised. Since the 1970s, studies of SLA have in part focused on the examination of the learner’s linguistic output as an independent natural language called IL (Corder, 1978; Selinker, 1972). As opposed to Contrastive Analysis of the 1950s and 1960s and Error Analysis of the 1970s, IL is no longer viewed as a collection of errors or a dependent linguistic system derived from the learner’s native or target language, but rather as an independent linguistic system in its own right. With the identification of acquisition sequences, one of the most important claims to have emerged in the field of SLA is that L2 acquisition proceeds in a regular and systematic fashion. In other words, the learner’s language exhibits common accuracy orders and developmental sequences (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991).
Although in the past three decades a number of acquisition sequences have been identified and a number of influential theories or hypotheses in SLA such as Krashen’s (1982) Natural Order hypothesis and the Multidimensional model by Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann (1981) have been proposed based on the discovery of those acquisition sequences, studies of acquisition sequences are limited to a few linguistic elements such as commonly used morphemes, negation, interrogation, and word order