Teaching English to children has been a field of rigorous research. One of the challenging issues in this field is understanding the nature of children’s learning. Particularly, in foreign language milieu teaching grammar has been a subject of investigation. This study offers insight to teaching grammar to children which is in line with their nature. This study aims to find out whether syntactic priming occurs in children and to what extent syntactic priming impacts on children’s developmental sequence of wh-questions and noun clause learning. The study was conducted in
classroom-based research. The participants were children aged 8-9 years old in an English course. The study administered pre and post-written and oral tests and also provided primes to see whether the children would produce wh-questions and noun
clause. The results revealed that children possessed syntactic priming. However, it appeared that syntactic priming did not give much impact on the children’s developmental sequence of wh-questions and noun clause learning. The main reason is because syntactic priming is sensitive to the children’s state of knowledge. |