Natural Order Hypothesis

4 thoughts on “Natural Order Hypothesis”

1. Eric Herman

   November 29, 2014 at 11:21 am

   Just beware if you plan to share that particular article on the NO with colleagues, because there are criticisms of the NO in that paper that are not answered, though Krashen had answered many of them back in his 1982 paper!

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2. Sean Lawler

   November 29, 2014 at 7:18 pm

   Well, we CI teachers don’t strictly follow this natural order in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes because we want to keep the instruction compelling. That’s pretty clear to me.

   Though Krashen said, “The stages for a given target language appear to be strikingly similar despite the first language of the acquirer” in his book Principles and Practice in SLA I’d still like to see the Spanish natural order list of grammatical morphemes. Krashen mentions a researcher by the name of Van Naerssen who worked on such a list in 1981.

   Anyways, isn’t this natural order list of grammatical morphemes dependent on the input (ideally comprehensible) that is delivered to a student? Like, in my class — even though Krashen says that the progressive comes before the third-person singular in the natural order — I use the third-person singular much more so than the progressive. For example, I’ll say, “he drives the car” much more so than “he is driving the car.” So, my students will acquire the third person before the progressive. And I don’t think I should stop using the third person singular as much as I do… because the 3rd person singular is better for story-asking.

   Perhaps the textbook guys, Mary Beth, would make a similar argument, that the order of grammar structures presented in their textbooks follow a sequence that coincides with students’ interest in communication.

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   1. Robert Harrell

      November 29, 2014 at 10:35 pm

      Several years ago I attended a German TPRS conference in Sweet Briar, Virginia. As part of the week, we watched a video of Stephen Krashen speaking. One of the things I remember hearing – whether from him or from someone else – is that simply because something is late acquired, that is not a reason to delay its introduction. In fact, late-acquired items may simply require more exposure before they are acquired, so by delaying their introduction we may be delaying their acquisition. That aligns well with Susan Gross’s advice about not sheltering grammar.

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      1. Eric Herman

         November 30, 2014 at 10:17 am

         You would not want to try to teach along the order.
         We only know the order for a few features. Every student is at a different i.
         So, given enough unsheltered CI, then everyone gets what they need (i+1).

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