Language Acquisition and Developmental Sequences

Michaele E. F. (Riki) Smith, PhD

California State University, East Bay

When children who are learning English begin to learn how to express past tense with verbs, they
go through four stages. These four stages are not salient with regular past tense verbs, but they are
with irregular past tense verb forms. Even though these stages are not seen with regular past tense
verbs, the thinking is that all verbs go through the same stages.
When children first begin to express past tense, they seem to get it “right” for regular (those
that take –ed) and irregular verbs (those that take different forms). So, at first they say talked,
called, ate, and broke. At this stage, these words are learned as individual chunks of information.
Soon after this “chunking” phase, children generalize the “ed” realization of past tense and
say talked, called, eated, and breaked. Some time later, they move through a reorganization phase
where they maintain the regular past tense form as in talked and incorporate the irregular forms into
the regular “ed” form as in ated. Finally, they enter the acquired stage where they begin to use
regular past tense verb forms (e.g., talked) and irregular verb forms (e.g., ate).
This is a normal developmental sequence for past tense verbs in English and is seen
throughout the different structures of language. For example, when an English language learner’s
first language has relative clauses, that speaker will use them early in her learning (as a result of
transfer). Later, however, she will start producing language full of errors around this structure.
Language teachers often mistake these errors as a sign that the student hasn’t “learned” the
structure, or has “forgotten” it. However, other students who are learning English, those whose first
language does not have relative clauses like those in English (and thus did not use it early in their
language learning), exhibit the same type of errors with the relative clause at the same stage.
These examples of language development illustrate the idea that humans have a “Language
Acquisition Device” (LAD) that operates on language input. What this means is that humans have a
capacity for language and that the brain is designed for acquiring language systems according to
some sequence. It is this sequence that intrigues researchers and for which we have no pat answers
right now. For language teachers, the first thing that comes to mind is that we “should” teach to the
sequence. There is no evidence for this conclusion, and there is some research that actually
counters it. So what good does this knowledge have for language learning and language teaching?
One area where the knowledge of developmental sequences is important is in error
correction. If an instructor realizes that the student “knew” all the irregular past tense forms three
weeks earlier and is now producing errors, she might decide to let it go or mention that there must
be some reorganization occurring instead of marking these as errors and negatively associating their
production with the student’s identity as a language learner.

1. Explain the process of learning past tense in English.

2. Think back over languages you have learned and see if you can recall having known some
language structure only to one day have “unlearned” it.

3. How would you apply this knowledge to your classroom teaching? What implications does
this information have for correction?

Michaele Smith/CSUEB/2009