Sequencing in SLA

This paper provides an overview of sequencing in SLA. It contends that much of language acquisition is in fact sequence learning (for vocabulary, the phonological units of language and their phonotactic sequences: for discourse, the lexical units of language and their sequences in clauses and collocations). It argues that the resultant long-term knowledge base of language sequences serves as the database for the acquisition of language grammar. It next demonstrates that SLA of lexis, idiom, collocation, and grammar are all determined by individual differences in learners' ability to remember simple verbal strings in order. It outlines how interactions between short-term and long-term phonological memory systems allow chunking and the tuning of language systems better to represent structural information for particular languages. It proposes mechanisms for the analysis of sequence information that result in knowledge of underlying grammar. Finally, it considers the relations between this empiricist approach and that of generative grammar.