Approches comparatives dans l’acquisition des langues: généralisations et applications

ln this article, the spontaneous acquisition of a second language by adult immigrants is studied from a cross-linguistic point of view, and explanations are briefly suggested for the main acquisitional stages shared by learners of five European languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Swedish. These stages emerge from the analysis of production data, and characterise the acquisition process from its very beginnings, via the progressive mastery of a "basic variety", towards that of certain, more language-specific, morpho-syntactic devices, ln the final section, a possible application of these research results to language teaching is discussed.