A CASE STUDY OF A JAPANESE CHILD LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE^1,²

Abstract

Major findings are reported here of a longitudinal, naturalistic study of the acquisition of English as a second language by a five‐year old Japanese girl. The emphasis is on empirical findings based on careful distributional analyses performed on the data, rather than on any particular theoretical orientation. The major content areas discussed are 1) the problem of prefabricated patterns (Hakuta 1974b); 2) the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes; and 3) the problem of language transfer. It is argued that there is still great need for a broader empirical data base before any serious attempts at theoretical formulations of the second language acquisition process are made.