Krashen’s natural order hypothesis is a fairly important idea for any language educator to consider when deciding how to teach.
The natural order hypothesis states that language is acquired in a particular order, and that this order does not change between learners, and is not affected by explicit instruction.
Mary Beth sent me an interesting link related to this topic. She made the point about how if there is a natural order of acquisition, how does that align or not align with the order in which language/grammatical concepts are presented in textbooks?
She says:
…after all, don’t the textbook guys know better than anybody? I mean, isn’t that why THEY are the ones writing the textbooks? So, I set out to find the actual research. I found some listing the top 14 or 15 morphemes in the order in which they are acquired….
http://journals.tc-library.org/index.php/tesol/article/viewFile/112/110
