As learners gradually start to pay some attention to grammatical items, they seem to work out 'rules' or 'regularities' which they then use to generate new language: they develop an internal grammar. This is not usually a conscious, intentional process. It just seems to happen, in both naturalistic and instructed learners. We're not entirely sure how, nor how the explicit teaching of grammar influences it.

Unfortunately for learners, grammars are full of variation and apparent irregularity (for example, form-function conflicts, which we discuss shortly in 2.1.6.3). Thus, language learners do not learn to apply grammatical features all at once, and they seem to simplify the grammatical system in ways which make sense to them - and which may not reflect either what they have been taught, assuming they have received instruction, or the precise grammatical structure of the target language. This process of gradual integration of the morphological and syntactic regularities of the target language is known as grammaticization.

Evidence of this process appears when learners overgeneralize grammatical features of the target language, in other words, when they use a grammatical feature in a context where it is partly right, but partly wrong. For example, English children acquiring their first language often produce such overgeneralized forms as the plurals childrens and mens and the past verbs flied, goed and even wented. Second language learners make similar overgeneralization errors, which are in fact testimony to their acquisition.

Reflective task 4

Now click on 'Commentary'.