ZISA Project
The ZISA project (Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Arbeiter, "Second Language Acquisition by Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Workers") was a research programme initiated in 1974 at the University of Wuppertal, directed by Jürgen Meisel with students Manfred Pienemann and Harald Clahsen, and continued through the late 1970s and early 1980s. It remains the empirical foundation on which Processability Theory was eventually built.
What They Did
ZISA followed 45 adult naturalistic learners of German with Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese L1s, migrant workers who had received no formal German instruction. The design combined a large cross-sectional study with a longitudinal sub-study of twelve learners recorded over roughly two years. Data came from informal conversational interviews, transcribed and coded for a wide range of morphosyntactic features.
What They Found
The finding that changed the field was a five-stage developmental sequence for German word order that learners moved through in the same order, regardless of L1:
- Canonical order (SVO): die kinder spielen mim ball
- Adverb-fronting without inversion: da kinder spielen
- Separation of verbal elements (PARTICLE): alle kinder muss die pause machen
- Inversion after fronted element: dann hat sie wieder die knoch gebringt
- Verb-end in subordinate clauses: er sagte dass er nach hause geht
Each stage was a prerequisite for the next. Instruction could not skip learners ahead; learners who were pushed beyond their current stage either avoided the structure or produced fossilised approximations.
Why It Mattered
ZISA made three moves that shaped the next thirty years of SLA:
- Universality across L1s: the same sequence appeared for learners from three different Romance L1s, which ruled out a simple transfer explanation.
- Processing constraints as the engine: the sequence could be explained by what the developing speech processor could handle, not by frequency or salience alone.
- Teachability bounded by readiness: instruction, when it works, works because it intersects with processing readiness, not because it supplies rules.
Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann's (1981) multidimensional model was the first theoretical consolidation of the ZISA findings; Pienemann and Johnston (1987) extended the approach to English as a second language; and Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998) generalised it into a cross-linguistic theory of how the L2 processor drives developmental sequences.
Limitations Acknowledged Later
ZISA's design is strong for morphosyntactic sequencing and weak for lexis, phonology, and pragmatics. The learners were adults in naturalistic settings; the project did not test instructed learners, young learners, or typologically distant L1s. Subsequent research has extended the approach across those dimensions, sometimes modifying the original claims, more often reinforcing the core finding that developmental sequences exist and resist simple pedagogic override.
References
- Meisel, J., Clahsen, H. & Pienemann, M. (1981). On determining developmental stages in natural second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 3(2), 109–135.
- Pienemann, M. & Johnston, M. (1987). Factors influencing the development of language proficiency. In D. Nunan (Ed.), Applying Second Language Acquisition Research. National Curriculum Resource Centre.
- Pienemann, M. (1998). Language Processing and Second Language Development: Processability Theory. John Benjamins.