Just spent a pleasant weekend with my old friend Jonathan and his family in Brussels. Elspeth is away on a university trip in Japan and Australia, so I thought I'd have a weekend away. We went to the René Magritte exhibition at the Brussels Museum of Modern Art. Very interesting, beautifully presented, though I am left baffled by Magritte's art. I'm sure I either analyse too much or not enough. Jonathan took us to his rhythm and blues club at Sounds - good solid rock/blues until 2 a.m. Sunday was spent relaxing, eating and walking.
The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
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