Second Language Grammar Development: Questions & Negation Stages

Littlewood's Stages of Language Acquisition

Forming Questions: Interrogative Structures

Stage 1: Minimal Disturbance Questions

Learners form their questions with the minimum possible disturbance of the basic sentence structure.

• Yes/No questions: Declarative word order with rising intonation. No inversion.
• WH- questions: No inversion. Declarative word order. The WH- word is placed at the front of the sentence.

Stage 2: Emergence of Inversion

Inversion sometimes takes place but sometimes does not. It first occurs regularly with 'to be' and 'can'. The first use of inversion with 'do' is in routine expressions which have been learned as fixed phrases, such as 'Do you know?'. 'Do' first emerges as a kind of prefix attached to 'you', which produces both correct-sounding utterances and errors.

Stage 3: Regular Inversion & 'Do' Development

The use of inversion spreads. It becomes regular with 'to be' and all modal verbs. Learners develop a productive ability to form questions by using an appropriate form of 'do'.

Negation in Second Language Learning

Stage 1: Pre-Verbal Negative Placement

Placing the negative element ('no' or 'not') before the verb. Spanish speakers mostly use 'no'. This pattern is very persistent and does not disappear until the final stage (L1 interference).

Stage 2: The 'Don't' Unit

The simple alternative to 'no' or 'not' is 'don’t'. 'Doesn’t' or 'didn’t' do not occur, and 'don’t' is treated as a single unit (the learner does not perceive 'do + not' but the whole block 'don’t'). It is used even before modals.

Stage 3: Auxiliary Verb Negation

Learners begin to place the negative element after auxiliary verbs such as 'is' and 'can'. E.g., 'You can’t tell her'.

Stage 4: Full 'Do' Function in Negation

'Do' performs its full functions as a marker of tense and person. E.g., 'It doesn’t spin'. However, for a time, the tense may be marked on both the auxiliary and the main verb. E.g., 'He didn’t found it' (an example of an error).

Language Transfer and Interference

• From a behaviorist perspective, when L1 habits are helpful for second language habits, this leads to positive transfer.
• On the contrary, differences between the two languages involve negative transfer or interference, which leads to difficulties and errors.

Errors and Second Language Learning Strategies

Interlingual Errors: L1 Influence

Due to transferring rules from the mother tongue.

Intralingual Errors: L2 Internal Processing

Due to the fact that the learner is processing the second language in its own terms.