Here are the slides I used for my talk on April 1st at the ResearchEd English and MFL Conference in Oxford. The title was "It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it." In the talk I argued for a pragmatic view of second language teaching methodology and suggested that, even though there are some general principles of effective language teaching, generic teacher skills may be more important than your chosen hybrid methodology.
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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