1. 毕业设计（论文）主要内容：

research on language acquisition addresses two core issues: (1) how is a language acquired? (2) how does language acquisition proceed? the first issues comes from the observation of the mismatch between the language input that a child receives and the linguistic knowledge that he or she finally attains. the second issue was motivated by l2 research findings dating back to the 1970s (e.g., brown, 1973) and relating to the existence of a natural order in the acquisition of a certain range of english morphemes. scholars at the time attempted to examine whether and to what extent universal stages can be identified in the fixed order along which learners develop their knowledge of l2 grammatical structures over time.

following the broader context of how l2 acquisition proceeds, this study aims to determine the stages of morpho-syntactic development of two english-major students of english as a second language at one specific point in time. the theoretical framework used is processability theory (pienemann, 1998, 2005), which regards language acquisition as a sequential and incremental developmental process. the emergence criteria stipulated in processability theory are employed to determine whether a certain range of grammatical structures have emerged in these two students' interlanguage and identify the developmental stages of l2 acquisition process. two chinese students, of which one is male and the other one is female, enrolled in the undergraduate course at school of foreign languages in wuhan university of technology participate as the informants. they both are native speakers of mandarin chinese and have over 10-years experience in learning english as a l2. two methods, a picture task and an interview, are applied for the data elicitation. since the informants of this study are esl students, this project complements the established empirical studies that have investigated the acquisition outcome of l2 learners who have received formal instruction and been exposed to naturalistic input. this study describes how to profile the development of l2 learners' acquisition from a processing perspective. two questions are required to be resolved:

2. 毕业设计（论文）主要任务及要求

1. searchonline and choose the classic and the recent literature to work on. focus on foreign language majors program details, processability theory, sla empirical studies, etc. the total number of theliterature is no less than 15 pieces, of which the number of englishliterature is no less than 7 pieces.

2.search for the related resources to identify the topic for the thesis. what isyour research aim? what is/are your research question(s)?

3. 毕业设计（论文）完成任务的计划与安排

before 15thjanuary: settlement of the title.

before25th february: submission of the outline.

4. 主要参考文献

[1] buyl, a. amp; housen, a. developmental stages in receptive grammar acquisition: a processability theory account [j]. second language research, 2015, 31(4): 523-550.

[2] charters, h., dao, l., amp; jansen, l. reassessing the applicability of processability theory: the case of nominal plural [j]. second language research, 2011, 27(4): 509-533.

[3] dyson, b. processability theory and the role of morphology in english as a second language development: a longitudinal study [j]. second language research, 2009, 25(3): 355-376.