Adult Acquisition of English as a Second Language Under Different Conditions of Exposure

Claims have been made regarding the differing contributions of formal classroom versus naturalistic settings to second language acquisition (D'Anglejan 1978; Krashen 1976; Krashen and Seliger 1975; Sajavaara 1981). A study was designed to test such claims by investigating the production of English grammatical morphology by 18 adult native speakers of Spanish under three different conditions of exposure to English L2: (1) Instruction Only, (2) Naturalistic, and (3) Mixed (a combination of 1 and 2). Effects of the three conditions of second language exposure were revealed in the types of errors produced during individual conversations with a researcher: (1) All subjects made errors of morpheme oversuppliance in inappropriate contexts and morpheme omission in required contexts; however, the former were more prevalent among Instruction Only subjects, and the latter more common among Naturalistic subjects. These differences were statistically significant. (2) The Naturalistic group tended to omit plural ‐ s endings on nouns which were premodified by quantifiers. This nonredundant marking of plurality, characteristic of many pidgin speakers, was significantly different from the nontarget plural productions of the other two groups. Despite these differences in production errors, statistically high correlations were found among the three groups of subjects with regard to rank order accuracy for grammatical morphology. Results of the study suggest that different conditions of exposure to English L2 do not significantly alter the accuracy order in which grammatical morphemes are produced. However, as reflected in production errors, different conditions appear to affect learners' hypotheses about the target morphology and their strategies for using it.