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A Corpus Based Study in Morpheme Acquisition Order of Young Learners of English

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A Corpus Based Study in Morpheme Acquisition Order of Young Learners of English Report nr: 2012ht00268 Department of Education Degree Project in Educational Sciences within General Education Studies, 15 credits Fall 2012 A Corpus Based Study in Morpheme Acquisition Order of Young Learners of English A comparison of Swedish students in grade 6 and grade 7 Su Yin Khor Supervisor: Christine Johansson, Ph.D., Department of English. Examiner: David Kronlid, Ph.D., Department of Education. 2 ABSTRACT This study investigated the morpheme acquisition order of Swedish students in grades 6 and 7, utilizing corpus texts drawn from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). It is an extension of Khor (2012) that focused on students in grades 9 and 12. Previous studies on morpheme acquisition order suggested that there was a natural sequence in acquiring morphemes, regardless of first language (L1). First language influence was said to be minimal or non-existing. Recently, studies have found evidence that L1 transfer is greater than first thought. This study examined three morphemes; articles, the preposition in, and plural form. The results showed that the errors that both groups made were consistent with the errors that were found in Khor (2012). The errors were of the same nature in all age groups, mainly in differences in (1) generic and specific usage of articles in Swedish and English, (2) the generic sense of regular plural nouns, (3) plural form of irregular nouns and nouns of Latin or Greek origin, (4) plural forms of countable and misuse of uncountable nouns, and (5) the usage of prepositions in Swedish and English. Current studies have also generated these results, which points towards strong L1 influence. The different usage and the errors suggest that the first language influence is stronger than first described, and consequently, that it influences the acquisition of morphemes. Therefore, the L1 seems to shape the order in which grammatical morphemes are acquired. Learners in one language group seem to learn the morphemes in a specific order, rather than a fixed universal order. Key words: morpheme acquisition order, natural order hypothesis, second language acquisition, Swedish learners, first language influence and transfer, corpus, morphological congruency 3 Table of Contents 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4 2 Background: Research questions, method and material ..................................................................... 4 2.1 Essential terms ......................................................................................................................... 7 2.2 Material and collection of data .................................................................................................. 8 2.2.1 Ethical issues ....................................................................................................................... 9 2.3 Methodology .......................................................................................................................... 10 2.3.1 Methodological concerns regarding text based research ...................................................... 11 3 Theoretical framework: review of previous research ....................................................................... 13 3.1 Historical review of research in morpheme order acquisition .................................................. 13 3.2 The idea of a natural order ...................................................................................................... 17 3.3 The role of the first language in learning the target language ................................................... 18 3.4 Ideas and arguments opposing the natural order hypothesis ................................................... 21 4 Results and analysis: the L1 influence in morpheme acquisition ...................................................... 23 4.1 Morpheme acquisition order of students in grade 6 ................................................................ 24 4.1.1 Articles a, the ....................................................................................................................... 26 4.1.2 The preposition in ............................................................................................................... 28 4.1.3 Plural –s .............................................................................................................................. 30 4.2 Morpheme acquisition order of students in grade 7 ................................................................ 31 4.2.1 Articles a, the ...................................................................................................................... 32 4.2.2 The preposition in ............................................................................................................... 34 4.2.3 Plural –s ......................................................................................................................... 35 4.3 Comparison of morpheme acquisition between grade 6 and grade 7 ....................................... 37 4.4 A comparison with grade 9 and grade 12 from Khor (2012) ................................................... 38 5 Concluding discussion .................................................................................................................... 39 6 Reference list .................................................................................................................................. 43 6.1 Primary source ........................................................................................................................ 43 6.2 Secondary sources .................................................................................................................. 43 4 1 Introduction The role of English in Sweden is different from many other countries because of its higher proximity to us through various media like TV, music, the Internet and video games. American and British television shows are not dubbed into Swedish, English is used in Swedish media, and the usage of English at universities is very common. This shows that English is found in many shapes in Sweden on a daily basis, and that is why studying how Swedish students learn English becomes interesting. Does the presence of the target language affect the student’s learning process? How does the student build the mental grammar of the second language? Is classroom based learning more effective than informal learning or not? There are many questions of this type that linguists within the field of second language acquisition (SLA) attempt to answer in their research, but also questions that English teachers deal with in the classroom. As a future English teacher, it is important to understand the errors that students make and identify the areas that are challenging to Swedish students. Teachers cannot see students’ learning process as only a classroom based situation; students are inspired by English media as well. Students receive input inside and outside the classroom, and both shape their language development. If their errors and language development are studied, the information found in their errors can provide a better image of aspects that the students find difficult, to fully understand the students’ development. Eventually, it will give me a better understanding of what I do in the classroom and how to use different types of material that students can benefit from. My interest in first and second language acquisition comes from my curiosity in how languages are acquired. I was brought up in a multilingual home, and I have studied multiple languages at university level. These experiences lead to more questions about the cognitive process, or processes, of language learning, and I wanted to find the answers for my questions. Our ability to learn languages is incredibly fascinating, and it is a skill that we depend on every day, which only makes it more important to study. 2 Background: Research questions, method and material This study is mainly concerned with the natural order hypothesis and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. The notion of a natural acquisition order of morphemes received much attention during the early 1970s and sparked a great interest among linguists, moving from the behaviorist influenced theories from the 1950s (Gass and Selinker 2008: 121). It was claimed that morphemes were acquired in a predictable order, regardless of the learners’ first language. 5 Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of a word and they do not only have a grammatical function: (a) Jim speaks six languages fluently. (b) Jim speak-s six language-s fluent-ly Morphemes are either lexical morphemes or grammatical morphemes. Lexical morphemes in (a) and (b) are Jim, speak, six, language, fluent, while the –s for agreement/tense, –s plural, and –ly belong to the group of grammatical morphemes (Hawkins 2001: 36). A lexical morpheme, such as language, is the stem and can function alone, but it can also be attached to another word or take a suffix. Grammatical morphemes do not carry a meaning but change the meaning of other words that they are attached too, fluent-ly, and they can also stand alone, such as of and will (Gass and Selinker 2001: 11). Linguists were more interested in grammatical morphemes, and how they were acquired by learners with different linguistic backgrounds. Studies used data that came from native English speakers, non-native speakers who were learning English,
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