Good news about our nascent Comenius link with the Institution Saint Louis (our exchange school), plus schools from Romania and Spain. Our initial planning meeting is in France on January 14th and 15th. This is a second Comenius link for Ripon Grammar School following a previous project with schools from Norway, Germany and Poland. The British Council seem to award their funds at the last moment, but we are up and running. An art teacher, Fiona Henson, is doing the paperwork, whilst members of the MFL department and maybe others will be doing the travelling. Should be semi-chaotic fun.
The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
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