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An Exploration of Normative L1 Arabic Acquisition Order in Jordanian Children

What does that mean, you ask?

If you’ve hung out around toddlers learning English, you may have noticed that they develop their English language use in similar ways. First, they start naming things (ball, doggy, Mama, milk) and acquire some function words (up, more, no, help). Then they start to add adjectives (red ball, bad doggy). When they get to verbs, they start with -ing verbs (What are you doing? Playing. What’s Daddy doing? Daddy eating), then they learn to talk about events in the past, and later they learn verb combinations (have finished, could eat) of increasing complexity (might have been).

When it comes to verbs, we know that older kids and adults learning English as an additional or foreign language also have a fixed order in which they learn to use English verb forms. This sequence is not vastly different from toddlers learning English as a first language, the biggest exception being that adults tend to learn the simple present (I live, I work, I go) before the present progressive (I’m making, I’m reading), because statements of fact are often more immediately useful to adults than descriptions of ongoing present action. Because we know this, we organize our textbooks for English language learners to teach these structures in the order that we can expect most learners to naturally master them.

Why work against what the brain is already doing?

I believe that if we had a better understanding of this acquisition sequence in toddlers learning Arabic as a first language, as well as adults learning Arabic as an additional language, we could use that sequence to design better Arabic textbooks that work with the brain’s natural tendencies. While some great research is being done on American, European and Japanese students studying Arabic at university, research on verb acquisition in Arab toddlers is much less studied. That’s where I come in.

For most of this year, I’ll be in Jordan reading books and playing with urban and rural Jordanian toddlers and recording our interactions. Then, I’ll be transcribing and studying their recorded speech and looking for patterns in which kinds of verbs and verb-parts (i.e. inflectional morphemes, like –ing or –ed in English) toddlers are using first, second, after that and later.

If you follow this blog….

You’ll also find out about

• How “Mr. Fellow” and our cat Waseem adjust to living abroad for the first time
• Our leisure travels around the kingdom for birding, sightseeing and relaxation
• The impact of regional and American politics on daily life in Jordan
• How Jordan has changed in the dozen years I was away, and
• Kids and other language learners saying the darnedest things!