The issue of syntactic development is one central to both linguistics and applied linguistics. This book introduces students to the acquisition of syntax in a second language - a topic which also has important implications for teaching languages. Without assuming a detailed background knowledge of linguistics, the author builds a coherent picture of second language grammatical development by showing the interactions between the syntactic, processing and functional/discourse approaches, looking at how and why these different approaches give different results. A synthesis of the research in the area is provided, and each chapter also looks at the implications of second language syntax research for the classroom.