English Language Teaching in its Social Context

182 MICHAEL H. LONG“interfering” with language learning. While differing considerably both in the detail of theirown proposals and in the rationales offered for them, each has claimed that the best way tolearn a language, inside or outside a classroom, is not by treating it as an object of study,but by experiencing it as a medium of communication.More recently, some non-interventionist positions have been espoused on the basis ofsecond language acquisition (SLA) theory and research findings (see e.g. Dulay and Burt1973; Ellis 1984; Felix 1981; Krashcn andTerrel1 1983; Prabhu 1987;Wode 1981). Mostoften cited in this context are the well attested developmental sequences in interlanguage (IL),such as those for Swedish negation, English relative clauses and German word order.Thesesequences are fixed series of overlapping stages, each characterizable by the relativefrequency of IL structures, which learners apparently have to traverse on the way to masteryof the target language system. (For the most comprehensive study of this phenomenon, seeJohnston 1985 .)Numerous studies show, for instance, that ESL negation has a four-stage sequence (forreview, see Schumann 1979):Stage1 NofX2 no/not/don’t V3 aux. -ncg.4 analyzed don’tSample utterancesNo is happy/No you pay itThey not working/He don’t have jobI can’t play/You mustn’t do that1 didn’t see her/She doesn’t live thereAt stages 1 and 2, not just Spanish speakers, whose L1 has pre-verbal negation, but alsoJapanese learners, whose native system is post-verbal, initially produce pre-verbally negatedutterances in ESL (Gillis and Weber 1976; Stauble 198 l), although the Japanese abandonthe 3tratcgy sooner (Zobl 1982). Pre-verbal negator placement appears to reflect stronginternal pressures, for it is widely observed in studies of both naturalistic and instructedSLA. Turkish speakers receiving formal instruction, for example, start with pre-verbalnegation in Swcdish, even though both L1 and L2 have post-verbal systems (Hyltcnstam1977).With minor variations, the evidence to date suggests that the same developmentalsequences are observed in the ILs of children and adults, of naturalistic, instructed andmixed lcarncrs, of learners from different L1 backgrounds, and of lcarncrs performing ondifferent tasks. L1 differences occasionally result in additional sub-stages and swifter orslower passage through stages, but not in disruption of the basic sequence by skipping stages(for review, see Ellis 1985; Larsen-Freeman and Long, in press; Zobl 1982).Passage through each stage, in order, appears to be unavoidable, and obligatoriness hasbeen incorporated into the definition of “stage” in SLA (Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann1981 ;Johnston 1985).As would be predicted if this definition is accurate, it also seems thatdevelopmental sequences are impervious to instruction. It has repeatedly been demonstratedthat morpheme accuracy orders and developmental sequences do not reflect instructionalsequences (Lightbown 1983; Ellis 1989), and tuition in a German SL word order structurebeyond students’ current processing abilities has been shown not to result in lcarning(Pienemann 1984).The results for developmental sequences, together with related findings of common(although not invariant) naturalistic and instructed morpheme accuracy orders, show thatlanguage learning is obviously at least partly governed by forces beyond a teacher’s ortextbook writer’s control. This realization has in turn led some theorists to conclude that