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A typical later stage is to place the negative marker between the subject and the verb, as in:
I no like this one. (Cancino et al. (1975) study of child
L2 acquisition)
and This no have calendar. (from Schumann's (1978a) study of
adult L2 acquisition)
before reaching the correct form.
Predictable stages in the acquisition of wh- questions in English include an early stage in which the wh- word appears before the rest of the sentence, which is otherwise left in its normal uninverted form, as in:
How he can be a doctor? (Klima and Bellugi, 1966, child L1
acquisition)
and What she is doing? (Ravem, 1974, child L2 acquisition)
Only later do acquirers begin to invert the subject and verb of the sentence. (A detailed review can be found in Dulay et al., in press.)
Transitional forms have been described for other languages and for other structures. The stages for a given target language appear to be strikingly similar despite the first language of the acquirer (although particular first languages may influence the duration of certain stages; see Schumann, 1979). This uniformity is thought to reflect the operation of the natural language acquisition process that is part of all of us. (For a discussion of some of the current issues and controversies concerning the natural order hypothesis, see Krashen, 1981.)
While the acquisition-learning distinction claims that two separate processes coexist in the adult, it does not state how they are used in second language performance. The Monitor hypothesis posits that acquisition and learning are used in very specific ways. Normally, acquisition "initiates" our utterances in a second language and is responsible for our fluency. Learning has only one function, and that is as a Monitor, or editor. Learning comes into play only to make changes in the form of our utterance, after is has been "produced" by the acquired system. This can happen before we speak or write, or after (self-correction). Figure 2.1 models this process.
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