Are Classroom and Naturalistic Acquisition the Same?

This article reports a study of the classroom acquisition of German word order rules by adult, successful language learners. Data elicited by an information-gap task performed by 39 learners of L2 Germanat two points in time are used to describe the sequence of acquisition of three obligatory word order rules. A comparison of this sequencewith that reported for naturalistic learners of German revealed no difference, despite the fact that the order in which the rules were introduced and the degree of emphasis given to the rules in the instruction differed from the naturalistic order. The classroom learners, however, did appear to be more successful than the naturalistic learnersin that they reached higher levels of acquisition in a shorter period of time. The results of this study support the claim that the classroom and naturalistic L2 acquisition of complex grammatical features such as word order follow similar routes. They also suggest that classroom learners may learn more rapidly. These findings are discussed with reference to both theories of L2 acquisition and language pedagogy.