This study investigates whether a natural order exists for non-native acquisition in the production of English syllable coda obstruents by Korean and Chinese adult native speakers. We recorded L2 English monosyllabic words produced by 66 Chinese and 51 Korean native speakers. The recorded speech was then evaluated by 11 native-speaker listeners of English to determine the accuracy of coda consonants. The results showed that in both Chinese and Korean languages, the mean proportion of L2 forms was consistently ordered across all groups of different proficiencies: Substitution > Insertion > Deletion. Our results support the Natural Order Hypothesis that non-native phonology has the same general order, no matter what might be the language proficiency of the learners or the learners’ native language. However, the results do not support the view that this order is the acquisition sequence or the difficulty order. Other findings include that non-native phonology operates according to recoverability rather than transfer or markedness.

The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean college students’ syntactic development, especially the order of acquisition in terms of the types of the sentences and clauses written in English essays. Eighty-six Korean female college students in Seoul participated in this study. For research method, the students wrote English essays with the given topic through the test web site. The essays were scored on a scale of one to six., and then were divided into three proficiency groups. After that, the students’ essays were analyzed and counted by types of sentences/clauses and frequency: simple/compound/complex sentences and nominal/adverbial/adjective clauses. The findings revealed significant differences in the frequency of different types of clauses by students’ English levels. The results showed that the amount of sentences/clauses based on the level of English proficiency was quite different. In particular, significant differences were found in the use of the complex sentences and subordinate clauses by levels. In addition, the use of adjective (relative) clauses was prominent only in the advanced level. Teaching implications were discussed and future research suggestions were made at the end of the paper.