The Effect of Formal Language Instruction on the Order of Morpheme Acquisition¹

We conducted a study to determine if informal learners of ESL had the same acquisition order of morphemes as formal learners have been found to possess. Secondly, we wanted to find out what would happen to the established order if only certain of the grammatical morphemes were to be explained and drilled. We found that we had overestimated the ability of our informal subject pool to produce English sentences; that we had to structure our tasks which caused the loss of some “naturalness”; that language instruction might result in improved performance in morpheme usage but not a change in the order of acquisition of morphemes; that a rank ordering type of statistical analysis is inadequate for morpheme acquisition studies.