Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is very similar to the process children use in acquiring first and second languages, learning english by kids. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language–natural communication–in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. Error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition, but caretakers and native speakers can modify their utterances addressed to acquirers to help them understand, and these modifications are thought to help the acquisition process.
It has been hypothesized that there is a fairly stable order of acquisition of structures in language acquisition, that is, one can see clear similarities across acquirers as to which structures tend to be acquired early and which tend to be acquired late. Acquirers need not have a conscious awareness of the “rules” they possess, and may self-correct only on the basis of a “feel” for grammaticality.
Conscious language learning, on the other hand, is thought to be helped a great deal by error correction and the presentation of explicit rules. Error correction it is maintained, helps the learner come to the correct mental representation of the linguistic generalization. Whether such feedback has this effect to a significant degree remains an open question. No invariant order of learning is claimed, although syllabi implicitly claim that learners proceed from simple to complex, a sequence that may not be identical to the acquisition sequence.