23 differences in first and second language learning that makes it important to dig out
more information on how the second language is acquired. This table compares three states occurring in L1 and L2 development.
Table 2.2 Comparison between first and second language development Troike -
Saville, 2006
L1 L2
INITIAL STATE Innate capacity
Innate capacity? L1 knowledge
World knowledge Interaction skills
INTERMEDIATE STATES
Child grammar Learners Language
Basic processes Maturation
Transfer Necessary conditions
Input
Reciprocal interaction
Input Facilitating conditions
Feedback Aptitude
Motivation Instruction
………….
FINAL STATE Native competence
Multilingual competence
From the table above it can be elaborated that in L1 learners language is innate, as stated by Chomsky 1957 that language can only be accounted for by
an innate, biological language acquisition device LAD or system. It is also believed by Chomsky that infants universally possess an innate “grammar
template”, or universal grammar. With this innate ability, the infants will be able to pick out the grammatical rules of the language they hear spoken around them as
they gradually construct the grammar of their mother tongue. For the second language acquisition, the innateness is still questionable as there are many factors
24 influencing the acquisition such as L1 knowledge, word knowledge as well as
interaction skills. The next stage proposed by Saville and Troike is intermediate states in
which the learners need to pass before they arrive at the final state. In this stage, the learners experiencing process in a direction to acquire either L1 or L2. Troike
and Saville mention that there is a similarity in the L1 and L2 acquisition. The basic process of child grammar is by means of maturation. Their acquisition is
getting better since they become more mature. Its development is spontaneous and it involves an unconscious process. Children do not need to learn about
grammatical rule explicitly because when they are exposed to the language they will unconsciously learn how to use the language. In this kind of acquisition, a
cognitive maturity plays a significant role. In second language acquisition, most of the learners are already mature and the cognitive maturity is no longer as
significant aspect in the success of the L2 acquisition. Interlanguage development involving several processes one of them is ‘transfer’, which divided into two
types: 1 positive transfer and 2 negative transfer. The transfers involve the use of their first language rules. Positive transfers occur when there are similarity of
rules or structures in L1 and L2 then when it the L1 rules is implemented by the learners in L2 the use is appropriate or acceptable. In contrast, negative transfers
occur when the L1 structures are not acceptable to be implemented in L2 and they are considered as an error.
After experiencing the intermediate states, both L1 and L2 learners come to the final state. Goals to achieve in this final state are different between L1 and
25 L2 learners. For L1 learners, the goal of this state is to achieve a native linguistic
competence while for L2 learners the goal to achieve a multilingual competence.
c. Influencing factors in Second Language Acquisition
Language learners are unique and their distinctiveness has resulting different success in language skill achievement. It is agreed by Shoebottom n.d.
that some of the language learners might learn faster and easier to achieve the language competence than the other, and some of them might need longer time to
achieve it. This commonly occurs in the first language as well as the second language learning. Some of the language learners who have high motivation to
learn will probably achieve the language competencies faster with a better result. In contrast, a language learner with lower motivation will not perform as good as
other language learners with higher motivation and determination. Particularly in second language acquisition, these varieties occur as a
result of several influencing factors. Ellis 1985 mentions several influencing factors in second language learning such as age, aptitude, intelligence, cognitive
style, attitudes, motivation, and personality. In addition, Dornyei 2005 comes up with an idea about Individual Differences ID which including the influencing
factors in the second language acquisition. According to Dornyei, ID “concerns on anything that marks a person as a distinct and unique human being”. To be
more specific, the ID refers to “dimensions of enduring personal characteristics that are assumed to apply to everybody and on which people differ by degree”. In
a case of second language learning, Dornyei highlights several important IDs such as personality, temperament, mood, language aptitude, motivation, self-
motivation, learning styles, cognitive styles, language learning strategies and
26 student self-regulation. Other that those IDs, Dornyei also adds anxiety, creativity,
willingness to communicate, self-esteem and learners beliefs as influencing factors in the success of second language acquisition.
In addition to Dornyei’s idea about IDs as influencing factors in language acquisitions, Cann 1992 beliefs that “ the most important factors in English as
the second language are age, intelligence, the amount of English spoken at home, pupil perception of parental support and first language acquisition.”
Comparatively, both Cann and Ellis mention age and intelligence as influencing factors in second language acquisitions. They both agree that those two factors are
playing significant role in the learners’ second language acquisitions processes.
2. Developmental Pattern a. Concept of Developmental Pattern
The noun phrase “developmental pattern” consists of two words, developmental and pattern. The word developmental can be broken down into
development-al. According to Oxford American Dictionary and thesaurus 2009, the word “development” refers to “the act or an instance of developing; the
process of being developed; a stage of growth and advancement.” Added with suffix –al then it becomes developmental which based on Oxford American
dictionary and thesaurus it means “incidental to growth”. Furthermore, the Oxford American dictionary and thesaurus describes the word “pattern” as “a regular or a
logical form, order or arrangement of parts”. Therefore, the phrase developmental pattern can be literally described as an order of arrangement of a stage of growth
and advancement. In addition, the developmental pattern of the acquisition of grammatical aspects of English can be interpreted as an order of arrangement of a
27 stage of growth and advancement in acquiring the grammatical aspects in the
English language. According to the results of previous researches of the learners’ language
on second language acquisition, Ellis 2008 claims “L2 acquisition proceeds in a regular, systematic fashion. Moreover, Ellis also states that the terms
developmental pattern of language acquisition refer to “general regularities evident in language acquisition”. It means that developmental pattern is obtained
by collecting the evidence to find out observable regularities that occur during an acquisition process of a new language. By obtaining the observable pattern then it
is possible to see the stages taken by the language learners during their second language acquisition process.
The terms developmental pattern in second language acquisition include two concepts of an order and a sequence. According to Ellis 2008, to the order
of acquisition is important to identify whether the learners’ acquire some target language features before others. In contrast to the order of acquisitions, the
sequence of acquisitions related to how learners acquire particular linguistic features in a target language. A study on Spanish and Chinese children on
‘natural’ spoken data by means of bilingual syntax measure by Dulay and Burt 1973 as cited in Ellis 2008 revealed the acquisition order for a group of
English morphemes remained the same irrespectively of the learners’ L1 or of the scoring method. There are also several studies showing that there is a standard
‘acquisition order’ that is quite similar ignoring some factors such as learners’ L1, age and the medium of language Ellis, 2008.
28
b. Stages in Developmental Pattern
There are some perspectives in viewing the developmental pattern of second language acquisition. Smith Truscott 2005 as cited in Ellis 2008,
distinguish the perspectives into two: the developmental perspectives and the linguistic perspectives. The first perspective views acquisition as gradual
processes with overlapping stages while the second perspective views acquisition as a movement of a rule system from one to another rule system. In this section,
the stages in developmental pattern of second language acquisition are viewed from developmental perspectives.
In a developmental perspective, a developmental pattern of language acquisition is divided into early stages, the acquisition of grammar and
morpheme, the acquisition of vocabulary and the acquisition of phonology. According to Ellis, there are three main aspects of the early L2 acquisition: silent
period, formulaic sequence, and also structural and semantic simplification. Silent period is obligatory in L1 acquisition but in L2 acquisition it is not obligatory
since the learners already familiar with the language and they have acquired one language other than the target language. Nevertheless, there were several
researchers such as Itoh and Hatch 1978, Hakuta 1978, Saville-Troike 1988 and Hanania and Gradman’s 1977 as cited in Ellis 2008 find some subjects of
their L2 studies experiencing silent period. According to the naturalistic setting, the next aspect of an L2 acquisition is a formulaic sequence that happens very
common in L2 acquisition in early stages. Lyons 1968 as cited in Ellis 2008 describes formulaic sequences as “expressions which are learned as unanalysable
wholes and employed on special occasions”. The last aspect in the early stage is
29 the structural and semantic simplification in which the L2 learners tend to omit
the grammatical function words such as auxiliary verbs. The following stages of language acquisition in developmental
perspectives are the acquisitions of grammatical morphemes particularly on the orders and sequences of language acquisitions. The main attentions of these stages
are the morpheme studies, the acquisition of tenses and aspects as well as the acquisition of syntactic structures. The focus of morpheme studies is only on the
order of acquisitions of grammatical functors, it does not focus on the sequences. Most of the morpheme studies employ cross-sectional data gathering method
although there are also a few numbers of studies employ longitudinal data gathering method. Another study as a focus of the grammatical morpheme
acquisition stage is the study of tenses and aspects. One of the studies was by Bardovi-Harlig 1999 and 2000 as well as Zielonka 2005 as cited in Ellis
2008 focus on how the language learners with different levels of acquisition in expressing the temporality. In which later Bardovi-Harlig 2000 find out that the
acquisition of expressing the temporality occurs in a slow and gradual process. In addition, Conroy n.d. proposes five stages in language development
and these stages apply to all languages 1 pre-production silent periods, 2 early production, 3 emergent stage, 4 intermediate fluency stage and 5 stabilization
stage. The language learners in the pre-production stage have minimal comprehension and they do not produce verbal production, they start to have the
receptive skills but not yet the productive skills. Therefore, this stage is also named as a silent period for the lack or the absence of productive skills in
language learners. In an early production stage, the language learners start to
