In the late 1970s, Pastsy Lightbown (1983a, b) carried out a series of longitudinal and cross-sectional investigations into the effect of audiolingual instruction on interlanguage development. The investigations focused on French-speaking learners aged 11-16 in Quebec, Canada. Students in these programmes typically participated in the types of rote repetition and pattern practice drill we saw in Examples 1 and 2.
The learners’, acquisition of certain English grammatical morphemes (for example, plural- s and the progressive –ing) was compared with the ‘natural order’ of acquisition observed in the interlanguage of uninstructed second language learners The results showed differences between the ‘natural order’ and the relative accuracy with which these classroom learners produced them.These findings suggested that the type of instruction student had experienced- a regular diet of isolated pattern practice drills-resulted in a developmental sequence that was different from that of learners in more natural learning environments. For example, after weeks of drilling on present progressive, students usually supplied both the auxiliary be and the –ing ending (for example, ‘He’s playing ball’). However, they also produced one or more of the morphemes in places where they did not belong (‘He’ want a cookie’). The same forms were produced with considerably less accuracy in obligatory context when they were no longer was being drilled instead. At this point, many students appeared to revert to what looked like a developmentally earlier stage, using no tense marking at all ( for example, ‘He play ball’ ). These findings provided evidence that an almost exclusive focus on accuracy and practice of particular grammatical forms does not mean that learners will be able to use the forms correctly outside the classroom drill setting, nor that they will continue to use them correctly once other forms are introduced. Not surprisingly, this instruction, that depended on repetition and drill of decontextualized. Sentences –did not seem to favor the development of comprehension, fluency, or communicative abilities either.