This paper aims to investigate the development of English syntax based on Pienemann’s (1998) Processability Theory (PT). While PT has been tested in various second language (L2) contexts, most previous PT studies have been done with L2 spoken data. The present study examines the English sentence formation in the spoken and written tasks performed by 80 Japanese native speakers using the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis in PT. The results of the analyses indicated similar developmental patterns in the learners’ spoken and written performances in terms of English syntax demonstrating support for PT. This study also showed that there was a statistically significant correlation between L2 speaking and L2 writing.
Second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language learning (FLL) research fields have seen an increasing number of theoretical and empirical studies focusing on cognitive linguistic insights into the relationships between linguistic form and meaning (e.g., Littlemore, 2009; Robinson & Ellis, 2008; Tyler, 2012). These studies argue that overt explanations of how language reflects a person’s mind facilitates SLA and FLL, because such information or knowledge, which is normally acquired implicitly by first language (L1) speakers, generates not only grammatically accurate but also contextually appropriate sentences (Boers, 2013). In fact, some empirical studies found that the cognitive linguistics (CL) approach is superior to the conventional approaches in SLA and FLL (e.g., Tyler, 2012). These findings are appealing because research has shown that conventional approaches fail to lead second language (L2) or foreign language (FL) learners to fully acquire certain linguistic features. The English article system is one of them. It is well known that English articles form such a complex grammatical system that a working knowledge of them is “notoriously hard to
