ABSTRACT
Learning a language is one of the most complex accomplishments humans achieve. We have known for many years that the story of children mastering their first language effortlessly in a short three- or four-year period is just that, a story. Research has long established that children learning their first language take at least eight years in an immersion situation to master many of the more complex grammatical constructions of their language. They generally do not gain productive control over much of derivational morphology until they are 10 or older. Many aspects of pragmatics take even longer. Given the length of time and attention needed for first language learning, it stands to reason that no new model of the structure of language can radically reduce the difficulty facing adult second language (L2) learners. However, the task of the adult L2 learner in the instructed L2 learning situation has been made even more difficult by the fact that important elements of systematicity that exist in language have not been captured by the traditional view of language. This view has been the mainstay of both descriptive and pedagogical grammars that underlie most modern L2 learning research and English language teaching (ELT) textbooks and materials for the past 50 plus years.
