The patterns of acquisition of the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French among 16 adult beginning and intermediate students were studied. Based on 15-minute speech samples in which both verb tenses were elicited by seeded questions and cues for descriptive and narrative monologues, the intermediate learners had greater success with the…

A study of the acquisition of the auxiliary (tense, modal, perfect, and progressive) by 36 adult learners of English as a second language at three levels whose first languages were Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish is reported. The students were given three tests, on oral production, written production, and written reception. Nineteen verb structures…

The role of language transfer in the acquisition of English as a second language as indicated in the production of relative clauses was examined. Analysis of adult Arab students' written responses to a variety of test types revealed that (1) language transfer is a significant factor in second language acquisition; (2) there is a distinction…

Current research on adult second language learning suggests that study is necessary to separate interference variables from intralinguistic variables and to determine the relative difficulty of structures in each group. This research on the acquisition of the English relative clause was specifically designed to test the transfer hypothesis…