Although a number of researchers over the years have focused on the language development of bilingual children, we currently possess only a fragmentary picture of the total phenomenon. Further, what appears to be known about the processes involved may need reexamination in light of recent theoretical and empirical work. It is the purpose of this article to review recent research (i.e., that done within the last five to six years), as well as to discuss difficulties inherent in research on bilingual children. In addition, the article argues for a multidisciplinary approach to research in the area and outlines suggested avenues of inquiry within such a framework. Throughout, the focus is on children's bilingual acquisition in naturalistic settings (i.e., prior to school attendance).

This article follows up on a study by Dagut and Laufer (1985), who found that Hebrew learners of English avoid phrasal verbs, such as ‘let down’, while preferring one-word verbs, such as ‘;disappoint’, since phrasal verbs do not exist in Hebrew. A corollary derived from Dagut and Laufer's study is that Dutch learners of English would tend not to avoid English phrasal verbs, since phrasal verbs also exist in Dutch. It was hypothesized, however, that Dutch learners of English as a second language (ESL) would avoid phrasal verbs, too, not for structural, but for semantic reasons. Three tests (multiple choice, memorization, and translation) were administered to intermediate and advanced Dutch learners of English. Each test contained 15 sentences, eliciting preference for either a phrasal verb or an equivalent one-word verb. The results show that, as expected, Dutch learners of English do not avoid phrasal verbs categorically. However, they seem to avoid those idiomatic phrasal verbs that they perceive as too Dutch-like (lack of contrast between the first and second language). Furthermore, they exhibit a tendency to adopt a play-it-safe strategy, preferring one-word verbs with general, multi-purpose meanings over phrasal verbs with specific, sometimes idiomatic, meanings. It is argued that this semantic play-it-safe strategy may have also played a causal role in the avoidance behavior of the Hebrew ESL learners observed by Dagut and Laufer.

The purpose of this descriptive cross-sectional study was to describe and rate the writing of Hispanic students in a bilingual program and to compare their writing with that of Hispanic students in a submersion program and with native English speakers in a regular program. Five dependent variables were investigated: rhetorical effectiveness, overall quality of writing, productivity, syntactic maturity, and error frequency. Analyses of variance for both grade and program revealed that the sixth graders had significantly higher scores than did the fourth graders on all of the dependent variables except for error frequency. The students in the regular program had significantly higher scores on rhetorical effectiveness and overall quality of writing than did the submersion program students and the bilingual program students; they also made significantly fewer errors than did the bilingual program students. The bilingual program students had significantly higher scores on syntactic maturity and productivity than did the submersion program students. Results suggest that students who learn to write in their L1 before learning to write in their L2 will write just as effectively in their L2 as those students who learn to write only in their L2.

Ninety-six second language learners of English responded to a 30-item multiple-choice questionnaire requiring them to identify the antecedent of a reflexive pronoun. Their judgments differ from those of a native-speaker control group in that they do not require that a reflexive take a clause mate antecedent, but both groups share a preference for subject over non-subject antecedents. The second language learners do not seem to transfer first language (L1) grammar into the second language (L2), nor do they recapitulate the course of L1 acquisition. An extension of Wexler and Manzini's (1987) parameter-setting model of L1 acquisition to L2 data may account for some of these results, but the high incidence of long-distance binding of reflexives remains problematic: these second language learners have set the governing category parameter too widely without positive evidence.

This article reports a study of the classroom acquisition of German word order rules by adult, successful language learners. Data elicited by an information-gap task performed by 39 learners of L2 Germanat two points in time are used to describe the sequence of acquisition of three obligatory word order rules. A comparison of this sequencewith that reported for naturalistic learners of German revealed no difference, despite the fact that the order in which the rules were introduced and the degree of emphasis given to the rules in the instruction differed from the naturalistic order. The classroom learners, however, did appear to be more successful than the naturalistic learnersin that they reached higher levels of acquisition in a shorter period of time. The results of this study support the claim that the classroom and naturalistic L2 acquisition of complex grammatical features such as word order follow similar routes. They also suggest that classroom learners may learn more rapidly. These findings are discussed with reference to both theories of L2 acquisition and language pedagogy.