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IS THERE A “NATURAL SEQUENCE” IN ADULT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING?
Author(s) -
Bailey Nathalie,
Madden Carolyn,
Krashen Stephen D.
Publication year - 1974
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1974.tb00505.x
Subject(s) - psychology , syntax , linguistics , language transfer , natural language , first language , natural (archaeology) , sequence (biology) , language acquisition , comprehension approach , mathematics education , chemistry , geography , philosophy , biochemistry , archaeology
The Bilingual Syntax Measure (Burt, Dulay, and Hernandez 1973) was administered to 73 adult learners of English as a second language in order to investigate accuracy of usage for eight English functors. It was found that there is a highly consistent order of relative difficulty in the use of the functors across different language backgrounds, indicating that learners are experiencing intra‐language difficulties. Also, the adult results agreed with those obtained by Dulay and Burt (1973) for 5 to 8 year old children learning English as a second language, indicating that children and adults use common strategies and process linguistic data in fundamentally similar ways.