SUMMARY
This paper examines the acquisition of the inflectional –s morphemes (the plural marker,genitive marker and third person singular present tense marker) in English by eighteenyoung ESL learners from two Chinese primary schools. Learners were shown pictures asstimuli, and they were asked to describe the pictures in English. During these sessions,the descriptions by the learners and the conversations between the researcher and thelearners were taped and later transcribed. The results of the study indicated that learnersexhibited a distinct accuracy order for the morphemes. The learners also exhibitedvariability and produced overgeneralizations in their L2 utterances. The findings in factsuggested that the acquisition of the –s morpheme was systematic and staged. Adiscussion on the reasons for the phenomenon then followed and some implications weredrawn for the teaching of these forms to young L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English.