ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that anybody who endeavors to learn a second language will go through specific stages of language development. According to some second language acquisition theorists (e.g., Krashen, 1981; Pienemann, 2007;), the way in which language is produced under natural time constraints is very regular and systematic. Pienemann's (1989, 2007) work has centered on one subsystem of language, namely morphosyntactic structures, that is, a given language's linguistic units such as words, parts of speech, or intonation. It gives us an interesting glimpse into how an ELL's language may progress (Table 1.1). Just as a baby needs to learn to crawl before it can walk, so too a second language learner will produce language structures only in a predetermined psychological order of complexity. What this means is that an ELL might utter “homework do” before being able to utter “tonight I homework do” before ultimately being able to produce a target-like structure such as “I will do my homework tonight.” Of course, within terms of communicative effectiveness, the first example is as successful as the last example. The main difference is that one is less English-like than the other.
