Acquisition and Assessment of Morphosyntax

In the introduction to this volume, the editors clarify the relevance of this chapter for those who work with adults starting their acquisition of a new language without the support of literacy. In addition to the obvious role of morphosyntax in building learners’ oral proficiency, morphosyntax is closely tied to reading comprehension. The learner can decode individual words without competence in the morphosyntax of a language, but such competence is required to understand sentences. The editors also make the point that much of the research described in this volume was not carried out on migrant adults with little or no education or native language literacy. It is worth restating there that this is because there is very little such research. While this also holds for research on the L2 acquisition of morphosyntax, not only there has been slightly more such research in this realm but there is also a strong tradition of research on migrant adults dating back to the 1970s on which to draw.