Instruction, First Language Influence, and Developmental Readiness in Second Language Acquisition

The researchers pretested 150 francophone children (age 11–12 years) with a variety of measures (including oral production, a preference task, and scrambled questions) designed to probe their knowledge and use of English questions. Each child’s developmental stage (in terms of the stages of acquisition of English questions proposed by Pienemann, Johnston, & Brindley, 1988) was determined. In oral production, most students were at stage 2 of the 5‐stage sequence. Over the next 2 weeks, they participated in classroom activities that exposed them to hundreds of English questions, mostly consistent with stage 4 and stage 5. These focussed activities were guided by their regular classroom teachers and integrated into the communicative activities that were typical of their English as a second language (ESL) program. The focussed activities accounted for about 1 hour out of a 4‐ or 5‐hour day in these intensive ESL classes. Following this intervention, the children were posttested, using essentially the same measures used on the pretest. Contrary to the predictions of Pienemann’s (1985) teachability hypothesis, learners who were at stage 3 prior to the focussed activities did not progress more in their use of questions in the oral production task than students at stage 2 at the time of the pretest. However, on other tasks, there was evidence that all students had some knowledge of stage 4 and stage 5 questions. Further analysis showed that students tended to accept higher stage questions (with inversion of subject and verb) if the subjects were pronouns, but not if they were nouns. This pattern is consistent with that of French, their first language (L1). The study adds to the literature that shows an interaction between developmental sequences and L1 influence and also suggests that explicit instruction, including contrastive metalinguistic information, may be needed to help students move beyond apparently stable interlanguage patterns.