A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

for example, where later studies by Ringboem (1987) quite clearly showed
interference from the learner's first language. Bailey, Madden & Krashen (1974)
suggested similar morpheme acquisition routes for children and adults thus
providing little evidence that adults processed linguistic data differently to
children. Krashen concluded that there was no fundamental change at puberty
in the process of acquisition but that 'affective' factors were responsible for any
differences in outcomes (Krashen, 1980, 1981, 1982). 'Affective' explanations
for possible child∕adult differences in second language development will be
discussed later in the chapter.

Some morpheme studies suggest that the route of second language
development is not affected by age but provide little information about the rate
or the eventual level Ofsuccess and, as Hatch claims, in formal and instructed
'learning' situations the relevance of a 'natural order* remains questionable:

"The order of acquisition of syntactic structures may be based on input, on
frequency, on numbers of forms to be sorted out, grammatical complexity,
semantic weight, perceptual saliency, or even pronunciation problems with
consonant clusters. How far and how fast the learner progresses may be
much more related to instruction, learner interest in the finer points of syntax,
and innumerable personal variables." (Hatch, 1978a: 66)

Ellis (1985: 245) suggests that 'it is necessary to separate out the effects that
formal instruction has on the route of Second Language Acquisition and on the
rate∕success of SLA'.

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