Receptive Grammar Acquisition from Teachers’ and Processability Theory Perspectives: Application to the L3 English Context

Abstract

Recent research on third or additional language (L3) acquisition highlights unique phenomena beyond second language acquisition. This study examines receptive aural competence in early morpho-syntactic structures among primary school L3 English learners in a bilingual (Italian-German) area of Italy from teachers’ and Processability Theory (PT) perspectives. PT proposes that learner interlanguage goes through a series of set stages before the morpho-syntactic elements of those stages may be incorporated into procedural memory. Data from two learner groups (N = 126), categorised according to age and hours of L3 English input, were collected using a picture selection task to assess the development of early grammatical structures in young learners, then ordered using implicational scaling and analysed against the proposed PT framework. A further dataset examines teachers’ perceptions of the order in which learners acquire those grammatical structures. In the light of results showing some PT-compatible systematicity in aural comprehension of the targeted morpho-syntactic elements, the article discusses perceptions of acquisitional order of grammar and their degree of alignment with PT’s predictions.