The study investigates Chinese students’ grammar developmental sequence and implications of the so-called “morpheme” studies. A brief overview of L1 and L2 research in this regard is provided. The paper explores the impact of three major dominants of acquisition order: semantic complexity, input frequency, and native language transfer.  A special corpus of Chinese students’ academic writing was created to present both qualitative and quantitative data for the research. The number of texts analyzed for this research is 510, comprising 701 440 words. The research is longitudinal; the data presented in this paper were obtained in the period of February 2015 – February 2017. The research will be carried out, thus the results which we want to discuss are preliminary.  The research findings provide support for pedagogical recommendations to present the patterns in receptive grammar acquisition (input) which can result in more error-free and diversified grammatical output.