9. The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Simple Codes in Second Language Acquisition

One of the most interesting case histories in the second language acquisition literature deals with two young acquirers of English as a second language, one successful and one unsuccessful. Paul, the successful acquirer, was 5 years old when he was first studied by E. Hatch's student, Huang (1971). According to Wagner-Gough and Hatch (1975), at least some of Paul's progress can be attributed to the fact that he had the benefit of input that was more appropriate for language acquisition. He engaged in conversations such as this one:

            Adult                            Paul
    Paul, are you writing?                 Yeah.
    What are you doing?                    I'm write.
    Paul, are you writing?                 Yeah.
    What are you doing?                    I'm writing.
    Is the baby crying?                    Baby is crying.

Such simple input is fixed on the "here and now" and contains a "limited body of graded language data", according to Wagner-Gough and Hatch.

Ricardo, the unsuccessful acquirer, was 13 years old when he was studied by Butterworth (1972), another student of Hatch, Despite the fact that Ricardo had been in the United States only a few months, he had to participate in discussions that were quite complex, involving topics displaced in time and space and often using advanced syntactical constructions. Here is an example:

            Adult                                            Ricardo
In Columbia, do they (lobsters) have claws?                  Claws?
Claws. Do they have... the lobsters do they have claws?      Octopus?
No. The lobsters. Do the lobsters have hands?                Huh?

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