isla (print) issn 2398–4155

Instructed
isla (online) issn 2398–4163
Second Language
Acquisition Short report

The effect of developmentally

moderated focus on form instruction
in Indonesian kindergarten children
learning English as a foreign language

Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase,

Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

Abstract

This short report summarises a current quasi-experimental investigation into

the effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction (DMFonF; Di
Biase 2002, 2008) in an EFL classroom in an Indonesian kindergarten. DMFonF
is an instructional approach which combines Pienemann’s (1984) teachability
hypothesis within Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998, 2011) with Long’s
(1991) focus on form (FonF) feedback. Specifically, the current study focuses on
the acquisition of English plural marking on nouns. One first-year Indonesian
kindergarten class (K1) and one second-year kindergarten class (K2) partici-
pated in the study. Children in both K1 and K2 were assessed at the beginning
of the study and all of them, bar one exception, were found to be at the lexical
stage; that is, they produced only single words and formulaic expressions in

Affiliations
Isriani Hardini: Western Sydney University, Australia
email: [email protected]/[email protected]
Bruno Di Biase: Western Sydney University, Australia
email: [email protected]
Satomi Kawaguchi: Western Sydney University, Australia
email: [email protected]
Carol Reid: Western Sydney University, Australia
email: [email protected]

isla vol 4.1 2020 49–61 doi: https://doi.org/10.1558/isla.39724

©2020, equinox publishing
50 Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

English without any grammatical markings. Analyses for K1 after one semes-
ter of instruction with DMFonF indicated that all the children acquired lexical
plural marking and nine out of ten children also acquired phrasal agreement
between quantifiers and nouns. A comparison of these results with K2 children
(who were one year ahead in their meaning-based instruction) suggests that
DMFonF instruction is effective in promoting grammatical development in the
second language acquisition of kindergarten children.

keywords: Indonesian kindergarten children; developmentally

moderated focus on form; Processability Theory; instructed
EFL; acquisition of plural marking

Introduction
The current study aims to investigate the effect of developmentally mod-
erated focus on form (DMFonF) instruction in English as a foreign lan-
guage (EFL) on Indonesian kindergarten children. In Indonesia, English is
currently a compulsory subject from secondary school to university level
(Dardjowidjojo 2000; Sulistiyo 2015). Some primary schools and kinder-
gartens, particularly in metropolitan areas, also include English within
their curriculum. The kindergarten in this study is located in the prov-
ince of West Java. As part of its curriculum, the kindergarten conducts
an EFL programme for three hours per day on every school day using,
broadly speaking, a communicative, meaning-based method in line with
the general kindergarten educational programme, which has no detailed
linguistic modules. Therefore, the teacher is responsible for determining
the details of the syllabus based on the themes provided by the school.
Given the broad and extensive history of second language acquisition
(SLA) research (e.g. Doughty and Long 2003; Larsen-Freeman and Long
1991), there might be a significant advantage for kindergarten educa-
tors to take on board the available linguistic knowledge and resources.
For instance, lexical acquisition is strongly connected to the emergence
of grammar in first language (L1) acquisition (Sansavini et al. 2006) and
child second language (L2) acquisition (Di Biase 2007). In L1 acquisition,
‘grammatical ability develops not only as a function of age but also depends
crucially on lexical abilities. Indeed, word combinations are usually absent
when children still produce less than 100 words and remain infrequent until
the vocabulary reaches 300 words’ (Sansavini et al. 2006:200). Therefore, it
is important to refer to L1 research on the same language, in order to find
possible similarities in the L2 acquisition process. Furthermore, Brown
(1973), in his longitudinal study of three L1-English children (Adam,
Sarah and Eve), observed that children go through five stages of language
 The effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction 51

development within a variable range of ages. These developmental stages

are consistent with Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann 1998), a theory
and model of SLA which offers a cognitive account of language develop-
ment in learners. The children in Brown’s study acquired lexical plural
marking on nouns (e.g. fingers, hands) between 1 year and 11 months of
age (Eve) and 2 years and 6 months of age (Adam), and acquired noun
phrase (NP) plural agreement between quantifiers and the head noun (e.g.
many birds, a lot of apples) between 2 years and 3 months of age (Eve) and
3 years and 2 months of age (Adam), with Sarah falling between this range.
Thus, lexical plural marking invariably emerged first and plural agreement
between quantifier, or plural determiner, and the head noun in the NP was
acquired later. PT predicts the same sequence for L2-English acquisition of
plural marking and provides a processing explanation for the reason why
phrasal agreement comes after lexical marking.
Research into the order of acquisition of morphemes in L2-English
found similar sequences to Brown’s study in both children (Dulay and Burt
1973) and adults (Bailey, Madden and Krashen 1974). Studies focusing
on the acquisition of plural marking in L2-English involving children are,
however, very limited, particularly in Indonesian kindergarten contexts. PT
studies of children learning English are mostly in the context of bilingual
first language acquisition (BFLA) (Itani-Adams 2007; Salleh 2017; Salleh
et al. 2016), except for Yamaguchi (2010), who studied English learning
in a primary school-aged Japanese child. Those studies investigated chil-
dren learning English in naturalistic environments, whereas the present
study examines the learning of L2-English by pre-school-aged children in
an instructed setting. Thus, the current study makes a valuable contribu-
tion to SLA research by filling these theoretical and methodological gaps
through addressing the following research question.
What grammatical developmental stage can Indonesian children achieve in
L2-English through the incorporation of a developmentally moderated focus on
form (DMFonF) instruction component in their kindergarten programme?

To investigate the above research question, we followed Di Biase’s quasi-

experimental design (2002, 2008). This author investigated grammatical
development in children (7–9 years old) learning L2-Italian in Australian
primary schools using a design that included a DMFonF component.
Furthermore, the study employs Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998)
in combination with the notion of focus on form (FonF; Long 1991), which
will be detailed in the next section.
The remainder of this short report is organised as follows. The next
section briefly summarises the theoretical framework of this study, the
52 Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

third section presents the research design and method of our longitudi-
nal quasi-experimental study. The fourth section analyses the results and
discusses the effects of DMFonF instruction. This is followed by the final
section outlining the conclusion for the current report.

Theoretical framework
The framework of this study is Processability Theory (PT), a theory of
SLA that can predict the learner’s developmental trajectories in the learn-
ing of any second language (Pienemann 1998; Pienemann, Di Biase and
Kawaguchi 2005). Depending on the language type, there are between
three and six hierarchichally arranged stages of morphological develop-
ment. Specifically, for the acquisition of plural marking, L2-English must
show instances of three morphological developmental PT stages, which
are illustrated in Table 1. The first stage is ‘lemma access’. In this stage, the
learner produces single words, greetings and formulaic expressions such as
apple, How are you? or My name is Pim. Words and formulaic expressions
are produced in isolation and are retrieved from a mental lexicon not yet
annotated for lexical class or other grammatical features. The second PT
stage is the ‘category procedure’. Within this stage, lexical categories (such
as noun, verb) as well as features (e.g. number) and their value (e.g. sin-
gular, plural and so on) are learned. At this stage, learners become able to
add -s to nouns, in order to indicate plural number without any exchange
of information with other elements in the phrase (e.g. my brothers). In the
third stage, namely the ‘phrasal procedure’, learners are able to exchange
information between constituents, such as determiners and the head noun,
within the noun phrase. Such exchange would produce plural agreement in
the NP between, for instance, a quantifier and the head noun, as in many
dogs; three black cats.

Table 1: Early developmental stages hypothesised for L2-English morphology

(adapted from Pienemann 2011:58).
Processing procedure Information exchange Morphology Examples
3. Phrasal procedure Information exchange phrasal plural these girls
within the NP marking many dogs
three black cats
2. Category procedure past -ed Mary jumped
No information exchange plural -s my brothers working
possessive ’s Mary’s car
verb -ing he eating
1. Lemma access Word single word, station, here
No information exchange formulae my name is Pim
 The effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction 53

PT’s developmental stages rely on emergence criteria, in order to decide

whether a specific structure has been acquired. Emergence criteria are ‘the
point in time at which certain skills have, in principle, been attained or
at which certain operations can, in principle, be carried out’ (Pienemann
1998:138). The emergence criteria are satisfied if the production data
instantiate both formal and lexical variation for the same structure. In
terms of the category procedure, for example, lexical plural is defined as
acquired if the production data instantiate both formal variation (e.g. ball,
balls) and lexical variation (e.g. balls, bananas) (Bettoni and Di Biase 2015).
PT’s predictions have been found to be compatible with longitudinal
results in bilingual and child L2-English acquisition, as outlined in the pre-
vious section. One study with contradictory findings is by Charters, Dao
and Jansen (2011), who claim that in some (precisely six out of thirty-six)
of the Vietnamese secondary school learners tested by Dao, plural agree-
ment seemed to appear before lexical plural marking. The study design
is, however, cross-sectional and ignores the examined learners’ previous
learning. Thus, the developmental claims may be regarded as not necessar-
ily reliable (Di Biase et al. 2019).
The present study proposed an instructional approach in an L2-English
programme, which Di Biase (2002, 2008) refers to as developmentally
moderated focus on form (DMFonF). Within DMFonF, the teaching pro-
gramme follows the stages outlined in PT. Di Biase combined Pienemann’s
(1984, 1998) teachability hypothesis and his general developmental
approach to language learning and teaching with Long’s (1991) focus on
form (FonF) feedback in an essentially meaning-based instructional pro-
gramme. According to the teachability hypothesis, a particular structure is
teachable if the learner has acquired the stage just prior to that structure.
For instance, if the learner is assessed to be at the first stage of development
(i.e. lemma access, see Table 1), the teachability hypothesis would predict
that the learner cannot learn a structure from the third stage of develop-
ment, such as phrasal agreement, if they have not first learned to mark the
plural on lexical items (second stage). That is, the form to be taught (in the
teaching programme, including feedback) may only be learned if the learner
is ‘developmentally ready’ for that particular structure (c.f. Mackey 1999).
Thus, ideally, the teaching method and the feedback approach should take
into account the learner’s current developmental stage. As such, FonF is
an instructional approach which ‘overtly draws attention to the linguistic
elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on
meaning or communication’ (Long 1991:45–6). For Long, the incidental
nature of FonF is central and it refers exclusively to feedback rather than
to the instructional programme itself. In contrast, DMFonF – rather than
54 Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

wait to react to an incidental communicative problem – takes a proactive

approach to teaching. It does this by focusing on a specific (developmen-
tally moderated) form for some part of the lesson, which is broadly com-
municative and meaning-based, and the teacher only gives feedback on
the form currently being focused on, disregarding other linguistic errors.
So DMFonF, taking advantage of previous research, assumes that develop-
ment will follow a specific path, and so it facilitates the learner along that
path by creating communicative opportunities to use that particular form.
Based on his earlier research on learning L2-Italian, Di Biase designed a
DMFonF programme for L2-Italian which specified the structures and the
order in which they would be dealt with, communicatively, in the class-
room, both in the programming and in the feedback given to learners. A
study designed along such lines was conducted within an Italian language
programme in three Sydney primary schools (Di Biase 2002). The results
showed that DMFonF was effective both in terms of learning results and
programme efficiency.

Research method
The research design adopted for this study was quasi-experimental and
classroom-based. It was conducted over one school semester and included
a pre-test, intervention and post-test. The participating children were from
two intact kindergarten class groups: one first-year class (K1, n = 10) with
children between four and five years of age, and one second-year class (K2,
n = 10) with children between five and six years of age. At the beginning of
the experiment, K1 had already received one semester of EFL instruction
and K2 were one year ahead of K1. Before this project was introduced,
both groups had received communicative meaning-based instruction in
English, focusing on English vocabulary learning, from the same teacher.
Data for the baseline were collected for each child in both groups at
the beginning of the research project. Data from K1 and K2 generated
the baseline of the children for each group before the introduction of the
DMFonF programme. Further, the K1 baseline was compared with data
from K2 (one year ahead of K1, taught by the same teacher), in order to
assess the language development, from the first to the second year at the
kindergarten, without DMFonF. Picture elicitation tasks aiming at facili-
tating the production of lexical items and early structures, such as plural
marking in various linguistic environments, were used to assess the devel-
opmental readiness of the children. The one-on-one 15–20-minute con-
versations in English between the researcher and each child outside the
classroom were audio-recorded. The elicitation pictures presented at least
 The effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction 55

Table 2: K1 baseline – number of lexical types per informant at time 1.

Category/
informant Zah Niz Kia Fap Sha Tsa Pan Hai Dac Kin Examples
Nouns 14 15 7 4 5 5 5 11 5 24 banana, dog
Adjectives 7 5 1 3 1 4 5 5 9 red, blue
Other 1 1 1 6 and, OK, yes
Total types 21 20 7 6 8 7 10 16 10 39

Table 3: K2 baseline – number of lexical types per informant at time 1.

Category/
informant Fah Jan Aqa Dan Far Que Aqi Raf Vit Zai Examples
Nouns 7 9 7 9 10 17 18 15 16 27 apple, cat
Adjectives 2 3 6 3 3 3 5 5 6 8 blue, yellow
Other 1 2 1 14 and, two, I’m fine
Total types 9 12 13 13 13 20 23 22 23 49

twelve opportunities for lexical plurals and at least twelve phrasal plurals.
Recordings were transcribed to enable a full distributional analysis. The
pre-test showed that all children (see Tables 2 and 3) had attained the first
PT stage (single words and formulae). Recall that K2 was one kindergarten
year ahead.
Taking the baselines into account, a programme consisting of two
(20–25 minute) sessions per week was designed and conducted over twelve
weeks using DMFonF instruction, which included communicative learning
activities on broad themes such as ‘Fruit and vegetables’, ‘Animals’ and so
on. The grammatical structures followed the developmental stages defined
by PT, building on, importantly, an already acquired lexicon which guar-
anteed stage 1 (see Tables 2 and 3), followed by lexical categories and fea-
tures, for example lexical plural marking on nouns, but not on adjectives
(stage 2), and finally, phrasal agreement in the NP (stage 3). An individual
post-test session, similar to the pre-test, was held with each child from
both K1 and K2 after the twelve weeks of instruction. It elicited the lexical
and grammatical items that may have been acquired through the DMFonF
programme. With regard to the post-test results, in this study we consider
only those from K1.

Results and discussion

This section summarises the results obtained from the K1 children, focus-
ing on the acquisition of plural marking compared with their own baselines.
Table 4 illustrates the pre-test production of grammatical forms (baseline)
56 Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

Table 4: Pre-test results for K1 in PT stages at time 1.

Stage/informant Zah Niz Kia Fap Sha Tsa Pan Hai Dac Kin
3. NP plural agreement
2. Lexical plural s –14 +1–16 –8 –2 –1 –5 –4 –11 –3 +2–21>2
1. Single word 21 20 7 6 8 7 10 16 10 39
‘+’, supplied in obligatory contexts; ‘–’, not supplied in obligatory contexts; ‘>’, oversupplied;
empty cell, no context produced.

in group K1 at time 1 (at the beginning of their second kindergarten semes-

ter), where the stimulus provided about twenty-four opportunities for the
production of lexical and/or phrasal plural marking.
All the children produced contexts for the lexical plural but did not
mark it, with the exception of Niz, who produced it only once out of sev-
enteen contexts (e.g. strawberries), and Kin, who was the most responsive,
producing twenty-five contexts altogether. Unlike Niz, however, Kin does
satisfy the emergence criteria for stage 2, because she produced the lexical
plural twice with different lexical items. She also oversupplied it twice on
nouns in the singular context, and failed to produce it in twenty-one con-
texts; for example, she produced blue star to refer to a number of blue
stars in the picture stimulus. However, such variable behaviour is common
when the structure has just emerged. To summarise, in terms of PT stages,
all of the children were at the first (single word) stage except Kin, who was
at the second (lexical) stage.
Table 5 shows K1’s results from the post-test at time 2; that is, at the end
of the semester, after 12 weeks of instruction with the DMFonF programme.
After the twelve-week DMFonF programme, all of the children attained
the lexical plural stage and nine out of ten attained the phrasal agreement
stage, for example Pan produced four blue triangles. It must be noted that
five children oversupplied the plural -s on nouns in singular contexts either

Table 5: Post-test results for K1 in PT stages at time 2.

Stage/­
informant Zah Niz Kia Fap Sha Tsa Pan Hai Dac Kin
3. NP plural +2–9 +2–3>2 +6–5>4 +6–1 +15–5>2 +14–1>1 +15–2 +13–1 +24
agreement
2. Lexical +32–2 +9–5>2 +13–8>3 +2 +8–9 +2 +8 +7–2 +9
plural s
1. Single 39 43 31 37 42 33 36 49 44 55
word
‘+’, supplied in obligatory contexts; ‘–’, not supplied in obligatory contexts; ‘>’, oversupplied;
empty cell, no context produced.
 The effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction 57

in lexical and/or phrasal contexts (e.g. one monkeys), which may be a devel-
opmental error (cf. Yamaguchi 2010). Kin did not produce lexical plurals
during the post-test but only phrasal agreement. Her plural NPs invariably
had a definite (e.g. four colourful books) or an indefinite quantifier modify-
ing the head noun. Indeed, she was the only child who produced plural
agreement with indefinite quantifiers such as lots of red tomatoes. These
emerge later than agreement with numerals (Di Biase, Kawaguchi and
Yamaguchi 2015). The results from K1 are consistent with the teachability
hypothesis, and the acquisition sequence is also consistent with Brown’s
(1973) findings.
One rather unexpected result for K1 at time 2 was the large increase
in the acquisition and spread of the children’s vocabulary. It was 2.8 times
larger than at time 1, and all children produced lexical categories other
than nouns and adjectives. This may be due to the focus on structured pro-
duction (by the children) required by the programme.
At this point, it may be interesting to compare K1’s development after
the DMFonF programme in their second kindergarten semester, not only
with their own baseline but also with the baseline of K2 children who were
one year ahead of K1 but who had not yet received DMFonF instruction
by that time. We would then be able to determine if an extra year in their
English class without DMFonF brought about additional benefits. Table 6
summarises the K2 baseline results (before DMFonF intervention).
From a grammatical point of view, all the children in K2 – despite the
extra year of instruction – were at the first stage, just as the K1 children
were. Within one subsequent semester of DMFonF instruction, the K1
children had advanced by two grammatical stages. Therefore, purely com-
municative, meaning-based instruction at the kindergarten did not seem
to promote grammatical development as measured by PT stages. However,
this does not mean that one previous extra year of English instruction in the
kindergarten did not benefit the children’s L2 acquisition. For example, the
pre-test results show that K2 had a richer lexicon than K1, as a comparison

Table 6: Pre-test results for K2 in PT stages at time 1.

Stage/­
informant Aqa Dan Far Aqi Fah Jan Raf Vit Que Zai
3. NP plural –5
agreement
2. Lexical –7 –8>1 +1–8 –8 +1–3 –5 –12 –13 +1–12>2 +1–14>1
plural s
1. Single word 13 13 13 23 9 12 22 23 20 49
‘+’, supplied in obligatory contexts; ‘–’, not supplied in obligatory contexts; ‘>’, oversupplied;
empty cell, no context produced.
58 Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

of Tables 2 and 3 demonstrates. Each K2 child had a greater number of

lexical types compared with each K1 child in the same rank order, with
an overall advantage of K2 as a group of about a 37% larger vocabulary.
There was also a modest increase in the presence of lexical types other than
nouns and adjectives, and in addition, as Table 6 shows, several of the chil-
dren were producing more complex contexts than single words and were
beginning to mark the plural -s, but the evidence was not sufficient for the
emergence criteria to be satisfied.

Conclusion
The current study examined the effect of DMFonF instruction within
Processability Theory, focusing on the acquisition of English plural marking
on nouns in Indonesian kindergarten children. Significant grammatical
development was found in the younger group of children, K1, who were
the focus of the current study. They were instructed using DMFonF for
twelve weeks and their results were compared with their own baselines. In
addition, the K1 children’s achievements were compared with the baseline
of another intact class group (K2), who were one year ahead at the same
kindergarten but who did not receive DMFonF instruction in L2-English
prior to our research taking place. The K1 children, who were at the first
PT stage, namely the single word stage, successfully progressed over two
further PT stages hypothesised for L2-English. That is, after one semester
of DMFonF intervention in their otherwise meaning-based English pro-
gramme, they progressed over the category procedure stage, where they
acquired the lexical morpheme -s to mark the plural number on nouns, as
well as the phrasal procedure stage, where they were able to exchange infor-
mation between a plural quantifier and the plural form of the head noun
within the English noun phrase. In other words, they were able to produce
plural agreement within the phrase. This was in contrast with their own
baseline results, as well as the baseline produced by an equivalent group
of children (K2) who had received three semesters of English instruction.
As revealed by the baseline results, neither group had progressed beyond
the single word stage. These results closely resemble those obtained by Di
Biase (2002) with primary school children learning L2-Italian in Australia.
Such cross-linguistic comparisons in L2 learning are made possible by the
common metrics provided by Processability Theory.
Our results confirm, then, that DMFonF instruction is arguably more
effective in kick-starting L2 grammatical development beyond lexical
learning than purely meaning-based instruction.
 The effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction 59

About the authors

Isriani Hardini is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University (WSU). She is a
member of Bilingualism Research Lab (BRL) at WSU and a lecturer at the State Islamic
Institute of Pekalongan, Central Java, Indonesia. Her research interests include second/
foreign language acquisition and bilingualism.

Bruno Di Biase is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the School of Humanities and

Communication Arts and a senior researcher at the BRL, WSU. His research and pub-
lications focus on bilingualism and second language acquisition within a processability
theory framework.

Satomi Kawaguchi is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Japanese at the School of

Humanities and Communication Arts and a senior researcher at the BRL, WSU. She
teaches Japanese, Second Language Acquisition and TESOL Research Methods. She
has published many journal articles and book chapters on language acquisition and
processabillity theory.

Carol Reid is Professor of sociology of education in the Centre for Educational Research
at the School of Education, WSU. Carol’s research explores processes of globalisation
and mobilities on youth, ethnicity and race and the intersections of these social identi-
ties with the changing nature of teacher’s work.

Acknowledgements
This paper is based on a presentation at the 18th International Symposium
of Processability Approaches to Language Acquisition (PALA), University
of Sydney, Australia, in September 2018. We thank Manfred Pienemann
and audiences at the Symposium for their critical comments and advice. We
also wish to express our gratitude to the teacher and the children who par-
ticipated in the study and Ministry of Religious Affairs (MoRA) Indonesia
for providing a scholarship to make this research possible. Finally, we wish
to thank three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and
Stacey Sherwood for proofreading.

References
Bailey, N., Madden, C. and Krashen, S. D. (1974) Is there a ‘natural sequence’ in adult
second language learning? Language Learning 24(2): 235–43. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1974.tb00505.x
Bettoni, C. and Di Biase, B. (2015) Processability Theory: theoretical bases and univer-
sal schedules. In C. Bettoni and B. D. Biase (eds) Grammatical Development in
Second Languages: Exploring the Boundaries of Processability Theory 19–80. Italy:
European Second Language Association.
Brown, R. (1973) A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674732469
Charters, H., Dao, L. and Jansen, L. (2011) Reassessing the applicability of Processabil-
60 Isriani Hardini, Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Carol Reid

ity Theory: the case of nominal plural. Second Language Research 27(4): 509–33.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658311405923
Dardjowidjojo, S. (2000) English teaching in Indonesia. EA Journal 18(1): 22–30.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9639.00010
Di Biase, B. (2002) Focusing strategies in second language development: a classroom-
based study of Italian L2 in primary school. In B. D. Biase (ed.) Developing a Second
Language, Acquisition, Processing and Pedagogy of Arabic, Chinese, English, Italian,
Japanese, Swedish 95–120. Melbourne: Language Australia.
Di Biase, B. (2007) A processability approach to the acquisition of Italian as a second
language: theory and applications. PhD thesis, Australian National University, Can-
berra. Retrieved on 19 January 2019 from http://hdl.handle.net/1885/6982.
Di Biase, B. (2008) Focus-on-form and development in L2 learning. In J.-U. Keßler (ed.)
Processability Approaches to Second Language Development and Second Language
Learning 197–219. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.
Di Biase, B., Kawaguchi, S. and Yamaguchi, Y. (2015) The development of English as a
second language. In C. Bettoni and B. D. Biase (eds) Grammatical Development in
Second Languages: Exploring the Boundaries of Processability Theory 85–115. Italy:
EuroSLA.
Di Biase, B., Hardini, I., Kawaguchi, S. and Reid, C. (2019) Phrasal before lexical? Plural
marking in EFL learners in Indonesia. Paper presented at the 2019 Processability
Approaches to Language Acquisition, Reykjavik, University of Iceland, 13–14
September.
Doughty, C. and Long, M. H. (2003) The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition.
London: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756492
Dulay, H. C. and Burt, M. K. (1973) Should we teach children syntax? Language Learn-
ing 23(2): 245–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1973.tb00659.x
Itani-Adams, Y. (2007) Lexical and grammatical development in Japanese-English bilin-
gual first language acquisition. In F. Mansouri (ed.) Second Language Acquisition
Research: Theory-Construction and Testing 165–90. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press.
Larsen-Freeman, D. and Long, M. H. (1991) An Introduction to Second Language Acqui-
sition Research. London: Routledge.
Long, M. H. (1991) Focus on form: a design feature in language teaching methodology.
In K. D. Bot, C. Kramsh and R. Ginsberg (eds) Foreign Language Research in Cross-
cultural Perspective 39–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/
sibil.2.07lon
Mackey, A. (1999) Input, interaction, and second language development: an empirical
study of question formation in ESL. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21(4):
557–87. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263199004027
Pienemann, M. (1984) Psychological constraints on the teachability of languages. Stud-
ies in Second Language Acquisition 6: 186–214. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0272263100005015
Pienemann, M. (1998) Language Processing and Second Language Development: Pro-
cessability Theory, Volume 15. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.15
Pienemann, M. (2011) Explaining developmental schedules. In M. Pienemann and J.-U.
Keßler (eds) Studying Processability Theory 50–63. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/palart.1
 The effect of developmentally moderated focus on form instruction 61

Pienemann, M., Di Biase, B. and Kawaguchi, S. (2005) Extending processability theory.

In M. Pienemann (ed.) Cross-linguistic Aspects of Processability Theory, Volume 30
199–251. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.
org/10.1075/sibil.30.09pie
Salleh, R. T. A. M. (2017) Bilingual first language acquisition in Malay and English: a
morphological and suprasegmental study in the development of plural expressions
in a bilingual child. PhD thesis, Western Sydney University, Sydney. Retrieved on 24
January 2019 from http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:46378.
Salleh, R. T. A. M., Kawaguchi, S., Jones, C. and Di Biase, B. (2016) The development of
plural expressions in a Malay-English bilingual child. International Journal of Asian
Literatures, Cultures and Englishes 10(2): 111–31.
Sansavini, A., Guarini, A., Alessandroni, R., Faldella, G., Giovanelli, G. and Salvioli, G.
(2006) Early relations between lexical and grammatical development in very imma-
ture Italian preterms. Journal of Child Language 33(1): 199–216. https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0305000905007208
Sulistiyo, U. (2015) Improving English as a foreign language teacher education in Indo-
nesia: the case of Jambi University. PhD thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Yamaguchi, Y. (2010) The acquisition of English as a second language by a Japanese
primary school child: a longitudinal study from a processability viewpoint. PhD
thesis, University of Western Sydney, Sydney. Retrieved on 10 January 2019 from
http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/489387.