Natural Order Hypothesis

This week, as promised, I'm focusing on Krashen's Natural Order Hypothesis. As the title suggests, it's pretty self-explanatory, so this email should be pretty short!

The Natural Order Hypothesis states that acquisition of grammatical structures occurs in a particular order, regardless of the order in which grammar is taught, and the natural order is usually not reflected in grammar-based textbook units. Think about the language that kids start with; they often start with the same types of errors that resolve as they get older (such as "Me want snack" rather than "I want a snack.")

Side note: that phrase is PROOF that people have a "language acquisition device" (LAD) in their brains, as proposed by Noam Chomsky. They're just not parroting back what they have heard their parents or other adults say, because what adult would ever say, "Me want snack"?? No, the kids are actually forming their own understanding of language and creating unique phrases. It's SO COOL. Okay side note over.

Second-language acquisition is similar to that, although the grammatical structures acquired by speakers of English as a first language are different from those acquired by speakers of English as a second language. This is the order posited by Krashen:

So according to Krashen, structures like, "He playing right now," "cows," and "He is sad" are among the first acquired when people are learning English as a second language. Regular past, like saying "He played soccer yesterday" rather than "He play soccer yesterday" are some of the last acquired. Adding s to the ends of words, such as "She plays soccer" rather than "She play soccer" and "John's pencil" rather than "John pencil" are fairly late acquired.

Another note: I used to get SO frustrated that my ELs would never add s to the end of verbs that needed them. No matter how many times I taught that "He/she/it needs an s at the end," they would still leave it off in their writing. Now I know why!! It wasn't my teaching--it's the natural order hypothesis.

How can teachers apply this in their classroom?

• Teach in the natural order. Be aware that some structures are more easily and sooner acquired than others, and teach in that order whenever possible. When grading writing, acknowledge that some structures are late acquired and may present even in advanced ELs' writing, even if they seem basic.
• Limit error correction. As I learned with the he/she/it verbs with -s at the end, no matter how many times you try to explicitly teach it, it won't sink in until they're ready. Instead, provide input where it is used correctly.
• Vary the input, differentiate as needed, spiral the curriculum. You will assuredly have students at all different levels in your classroom. Using more simple structures that some students have already acquired will help imprint them in their minds, while it may help less-proficient students acquire them for the first time. Using more advanced structures will help more-proficient students begin to acquire them, as well as the less-proficient students when they are ready.
• Keep the input RICH. I'll talk about this more next week, but basically, input needs to be repetitive, interesting, comprehensible, and high-frequency in order for it to lead most effectively to language acquisition.