Basic Finding #2. November 17, 2020. The development of a mental representation for language has three fundamental characteristics: (1) it is slow; (2) it is piecemeal; (3) it is stage-like.

Acquisition is exceedingly slow. Consider the child L1 acquirer who spends something like 14,000 waking hours interacting with language before attending kindergarten, and yet still does not have a complete adult-like system. For most L1 learners, that system isn't fully adult-like until puberty, although vocabulary and other non-formal aspects of language keep growing and changing throughout life. L2 acquisition is just as slow, but teachers tend to think in years rather than hours. That is, they may not consider that four years for a second language learner is not the same as four years for a first language learner. The contact hours within those two years are clearly different in terms of quantity and quality of contact. You can do the math in your head about quantity (i.e., your students' "real" contact time with input) as well as the quality of that input (i.e., the extent to which learners are immersed in communicative events during those contact hours). There will be a post about input later this week.

Acquisition is piecemeal in that, for example, learners of Spanish don't acquire the person-number endings all at once. They first acquire bare verb forms and use those as a "default" verb form (e.g., come, toma, vive 'eat', 'drink', 'live'). This is followed by a second stage in which the singular forms creep in to replace bare forms (e.g., 1st and 2nd person singular, como/comes, tomo/tomas, vivo/vives). This is followed by a third stage in which the plural forms creep in (e.g., comen/comemos, toman/tomamos, viven.vivimos) and the bare forms become restricted to 3rd person singular.

Acquisition is stage-like in that the acquisition of any given "structure" or "rule" tends to consist of stages. Example: the acquisition of ser/estar ('to be') in Spanish consists of four broad stages, with the first stage being, surprisingly, no verb at all! (Juan, uh, alto 'John, uh, tall.', La profesora no aquí 'The prof not here'). Again, traversing through stages takes time and is replete with fall starts, stops, and overlaps with other stages. Stages aren't neat little boxes where a learner hops from one to another.

In addition, at each stage of acquisition, the learners are creating an implicit system. For example, in the first stage of the acquisition of ser/estar in Spanish, learners have created a system that is tenseless. The absence of such verbs (e.g., Juan, uh, alto) points to a tenseless system because one of the main duties of linking verbs is to carry temporal information (e.g., present, past, future) because such verbs have no real-world meaning themselves (as opposed to verbs like eat, runand die). At the same time, learners rely on bare verbs such as come, toma, and vive, to express meaning. Such verbs are also tenseless (which is why they are called bare verbs). But learners aren't exposed to a tenseless language and they sure don't "practice" one; yet unconsciously, they create one.

The piecemeal, stage-like, and implicit nature of acquisition leads researchers to conclude that there is "ordered development" in acquisition independent of external forces such as instruction (about which there will be a post later). Ordered development in turn is strongly indicative of learner-internal mechanisms that act on linguistic data in particular ways. Researchers may disagree on the exact nature of those mechanisms, but they agree that something exists inside the learner's head that constrains, guides, and otherwise directs the acquisition of a linguistic system in particular ways such that we get various "universal things" going on in language acquisition.

Why don't teachers see such development in their learners? Some do, especially if they are involved in CCLT and they observe learner spontaneous, unrehearsed, and unmonitored speech. But most teachers aren't involved in CCLT and only see what their learners do under controlled, monitored performance in the public sphere of the classroom and an environment in which explicit knowledge is prioritized over acquisition (including, for example, written work). When classroom learners are pulled from this environment and are tested by researchers in various ways, the ordered development described here is visible.

For those thinking about Krashen's Natural Order Hypothesis, that idea is subsumed under this more encompassing idea of ordered development. Ordered development supports Krashen's original idea but expands on it in important ways to show how broadly the learner's linguistic system follows particular paths over time.

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Bill VanPatten
inputandmore@gmail.com
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