The Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes by Adult ESL Students

This study was designed to determine if the reported sequence of acquisition of grammatical morphemes for second language learners (Dulay and Burt, 1973, 1974; Bailey, Madden and Krashen, 1974) would be found to exist in tasks other than that requiring speech production. A battery of five tasks: reading, writing, listening, imitating and speaking were administered to twenty-four adult ESL learners, six from each of four native-language backgrounds (Arabic, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish). After scoring for morpheme suppliance in obligatory contexts, and using the Group Score Method (Dulay and Burt, 1974) to order the morphemes, a high level of concordance was found across language groups with regards to morpheme ordering within task. There was, however, individual and language group variability apparent. When comparing morpheme sequencing across tasks for all subjects, there was not the same high degree of relationship. Speculations are made to account for these findings.