Errors and Strategies in Child Second Language Acquisition

The study attempts to determine whether the syntactic errors children make while learning a second language are due to native language or to cognitive strategies as has been found in first language acquisition. 513 utterances containing errors were extracted from the natural speech of 179 children, 5-8 years old, learning English as a second language. Only those errors which could be classified without question as interference or developmental were included in the sample. The results indicate that first language accounts for only 4.7% of the children's errors, while strategies account for 87.1% of the errors. These findings suggest that less explicit teaching of ESL syntax to children may produce better learning.