| Over the past three decades a large number of studies have indicated that there is
a natural order for language acquisition. Language learners naturally go through
similar developmental stages. This is the natural order hypothesis proposed by
Krashen (1982) as a result of exploration of the acquisition order of grammatical
morphemes in English. The issues of a natural sequence in acquisition, and the
need to make teaching as compatible as possible with this order, have long been
fundamental in second language acquisition (SLA) research and in languagelearning
pedagogy. The majority of research studies revealed developmental
patterns through the journey of acquiring a second language. In this journey,
acquisition order and developmental sequence are considered core points. In this
regard, two questions are posed by Ellis (1994, p. 73) to illustrate the distinction
between them:
1. “Do learners acquire some target language (TL) features before others?” This
question pertains to the order of acquisition. As an instance, plural -s in
English is normally acquired before other features such as third person or
possessive -s.
2. “How do learners acquire a particular TL feature?” By answering this question,
one may find evidence for a developmental sequence of acquisition and
come to explain how learners gradually pass through stages to arrive at
the TL.
In order to explore these aspects, the teachability hypothesis (TH), the learnability
hypothesis (LH) (Pienemann, 1984, 1989), and the processability theory (PT)
(Pienemann, 1998, 2005) were developed, all of which are based on a multidimensional
model (MM). |