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- Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: On the basis of questionnaire data, this study seeks to find a tendency for native language influence in the judgement of German-speaking learners of English. Seeing that the concept of language transfer has received diverse weight in the history of second language acquisition (SLA), the present account illuminates the issue anew, with a specific linguistic concern. Inversion structures, though not canonical, are very frequent in the German language, whereas the English language offers comparatively rare environments which trigger or allow for inversions. As previous studies found, language transfer, in regard to word order, emerged when the native language exhibited flexible word order, and the language to be learnt, in contrast, had a rather fixed one. This gave rise to the assumption that German natives would generally accept subject-verb inversion in declarative sentences in English, even if for a native speaker of English the structure would not be acceptable. Thus, the second language learners are expected to score high on the acceptability rate for the majority of instances of inversion in English, since the German equivalents of the test items are basically quite acceptable in German.
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English Inversion in Second Language Acquisition
vorgelegt von: Theresa Schmidt
Jena, den 29. Oktober 2007
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AbstractI
On the basis of questionnaire data, this study seeks to find a tendency for native language influence in the judgement of German-speaking learners of English. Seeing that the concept of language transfer has received diverse weight in the history of second language acquisition (SLA), the present account illuminates the issue anew, with a specific linguistic concern. Inversion structures, though not canonical, are very frequent in the German language, whereas the English language offers comparatively rare environments which trigger or allow for inversions. As previous studies found, language transfer, in regard to word order, emerged when the native language exhibited flexible word order, and the language to be learnt, in contrast, had a rather fixed one. This gave rise to the assumption that German natives would generally accept subject-verb inversion in declarative sentences in English, even if for a native speaker of English the structure would not be acceptable. Thus, the second language learners are expected to score high on the acceptability rate for the majority of instances of inversion in English, since the German equivalents of the test items are basically quite acceptable in German.
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List of tablesV
Table 1 Questionnaire 1 - Total of test items 37 Table 2 Questionnaire 2 - Total of test items 39 Table 3 Questionnaire 3 - Total of test items 42 Table 4 Possible scores for all test items 44 Table 5 Overview of the distribution of the questionnaires 46 Table 6 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -47
Table 7 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -51
Table 8 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -54
Table 9 German equivalents of all test items of Q1 (NegInv) 92 Table 10 German equivalents of all test items of Q2 93 (LocInv, initial PP) Table 11 German equivalents of all test items of Q3 94
(LocInv, subject complexity) Table 12 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -95
Table 13 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -95
Table 14 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -96
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List of tablesVI
Table 16 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -97
Table 17 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -98
Table 18 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -98
Table 19 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -99
Table 20 Raw and relative frequency data (number of responses) -99
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Introduction 1
Anyone who has ever learned a foreign language is familiar with a range of uncertainties when it comes to situations in which actual confrontation with this language is required. A frequently observed (often in language teaching environments) habit of insecure language learners is to fall back on their native language by transferring (phonological, syntactical, etc.) knowledge to the language which is learnt. Although the influence of the mother tongue1in second language acquisition has to be seen as only one amongst a variety of factors which have an impact on the learning process, it is an effective strategy for learners to compensate, for instance, communicative gaps (which are caused by a lack of second language knowledge). In teaching, for instance, knowledge of specific transfer phenomena can help to explicitly detect major sources of error.
In their practical guide for teachers of English, Swan and Smith (1988) explicitly point out which errors are typical of German learners, who are learning English as a foreign language, and which are said to be directly related to native language influence. Particularly illustrative for the central purpose of this study is the following example demonstrating an error in word order:
The grammatical structure exhibited here (erroneously!) is called inversion of subject and verb - although in German inversion principally represents a deviance from the basic word order, namely SVO (though this is not completely accepted), it is much more productive than in English, a language which is more fixed in terms of word order. Inversion per se is a
1Also referred to aslinguistic interference, language transferandnative language influence.
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Introduction 2
highly complex phenomenon, and numerous attempts have been made (at least in English) to elucidate its purpose.
Primarily, the interest of this study is how learners of English (as their first foreign language) with German as their native language background evaluate inversion in English declarative sentences. To what extent will different types of inversion structures under diverse conditions be accepted? And what is more, how can cross-linguistic influence account for such observations? In order to attain reliable insights, three questionnaires have been conducted which were submitted to six groups of German-speaking learners of English. The paper is structured as follows. In the remainder of this section, some related word-order studies are briefly discussed; subsequently the underlying hypotheses of this study are explicitly pointed out. Section 2 gives a general introduction to the study of second language acquisition (henceforth SLA) by referring to specific keywords, literature, and other important issues in the field, and by illuminating (chronologically) major theories on which the contemporary discipline is based. As it is of central interest in this study, a separate account on the concept oftransferfollows. Section 3 provides a comprehensive theoretical fundament in order for the reader to grasp the complex phenomenon of inversion, and highlights relevant issues regarding this study. Section 4 contains an extensive description of methodological issues applied in the survey. An analysis and discussion of the results can be found in section 5. Some implications for further research are finally discussed in section 6.
1.2 Review of related studies
Even if word order phenomena have been subject to a number of recent studies in SLA, inversion in declarative sentences in relation to issues of native language influence has not been investigated as a subject of study in its own right, as it is in the present paper - at least not with regard to German learners. Furthermore, to my knowledge, no special consideration has been devoted to the investigation of the particular inversion types in the context of SLA which were to be judged in the survey that provides the spine of this study. Nevertheless, there are several studies which discovered that learners whose native language exhibits flexible word order tend to transfer these word order patterns into their learner language system, which then causes syntactic errors in the target language output if
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Introduction 3
this is a language possessing rigid word order (cf. Selinker 1969, Bates and MacWhinney 1981, Gilsan 1985). These findings can be seen as a general baseline for the predictions made in this thesis. Other findings, though, revealed that beginners in language learning (whose native language exhibits flexible word order) tend to cling to a fixed word order in the second language in order to rely on at least one constant in their state of initial insecurity. This observation by Pienemann (1981) was based on interview data from three Italian girls who were acquiring German as a second language, and might serve as an explanation of the sometimes unexpected results of this study. Furthermore, Ilomaki (2005) investigated a number of phenomena regarding cross-linguistic influence by accounting for errors; for what she conducted an error-recognition and a translation test with Finnish-speaking and Englishspeaking learners of German. An analysis of the errors revealed that the English learners in particular (Finnish has flexible word order) were prone to avoid the inversion of subject and verb when German necessarily demanded such a structure. This may support the assumption that in the reverse case (German learners of English) as regards word order, difficulties in terms of cross-linguistic influence might also be possible, as English and German exhibit a different degree of markedness concerning non-SVO patterns (cf. section 3.3), such as inversion.
As concerns the investigation of subject complexity in locative inversion, which will be one part of the general focus of my survey, the corpus-study of Lozano and Mendikoetxea (2006) should be mentioned. Their research interest dealt with the written production of post-verbal subjects under specific conditions of Spanish and Italian learners of English as a second language. Amongst other predictions, they hypothesised that the tendency for the occurrence of subject inversion increases when “the subject is long and ‘heavy’” (2006:1). This claim was unambiguously confirmed by the result of their examination. Thus, it can be stated that learners (at least from Romanic language background) typically tend to invert subjects which are ‘heavy’2, in contrast to ‘light’ subjects, which occur in pre-verbal position. This topic will be discussed further in section 4.2.3.
2This wording refers to a high degree of complexity of the respective element (e.g. extended by a variety of modifiers).
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Introduction 4
Drawing on previous work in SLA (which will be outlined in detail below), but originally inspired by observations gained from my own foreign language teaching experiences, this survey generally seeks to find evidence of native language influence in the judgements of German-speaking learners of English. The investigation is restricted to SLA in a classroom setting. The data was obtained by asking the learners - on a perceptive level - for there judgement of a list of English sentences by rating them in terms of acceptability. The groups being observed in the survey are not representative samples - rather, this study attempts to reflect a tangible tendency either in favour of or against the following predictions. The central research questions are:
Doesnative language transfer have an impact on the judgement of English inversion structures by German-speaking learners?
Dodifferent degrees of markedness for one phenomenon in two languages entail language transfer?
Howcan the issue of instruction be taken into account in this context?
These can be specified in formulating the following predictions (which are further specified in sections 4.2.1-4.2.3):
H1Due to native language transfer, inversion structures which are acceptable in English are predicted to be rated highest on the acceptability scale by the learners.
H2Generally on the same basis as H1, inversion structures which are least acceptable or unacceptable in English are not expected to be completely rejected, rather to achieve also a considerable rate of acceptability; if so, those cases can be categorised as resulting from interference (negative transfer).
H3Inversion structures involving a different degree of subject complexity are predicted to score highest for the most complex (long) subjects; the acceptability rate will gradually decrease down the scale via intermediate subject complexity towards short subjects.
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Second Language Acquisition 5
Serious social, political, and industrial developments of modern times were accompanied by an increasing interest in the nature of language learning and the subsequent intense study thereof. This curiosity set in around the middle of the twentieth century3. With the incipient globalisation of the world, the growing cross-cultural interaction entailed an exigent need to facilitate communication. This, in turn, called for the profound investigation of how languages are learnt, and how they most effectively have to be taught, as well as the implications linked to these questions.
There is a relatively concise number of introductory literature and handbooks on second language acquisition which give a general overview of the discipline (cf. Klein 1986; Ellis 1997a, [and rather comprehensive] 1997c; Gass and Selinker 2001; Mitchell and Myles 2004; Lightbown and Spada 2006; Saville-Troike 2006; as well as the handbooks edited by Ritchie and Bhatia 1996; Bausch, Christ, and Krumm 2003 [particularly focusing on issues concerning instruction and SLA]; Doughty and Long 2005; inter alia), as well as works especially addressing questions concerning SLA research (cf. Ritchie [ed.] 1978; Larsen-Freeman and Long 1994; Ellis 1997b; Byrnes [ed.] 1998; Aguado [ed.] 2000; Gass and Mackey 2005; inter alia). In the following, I will adopt the general tradition pursued by the majority of these works; that is to initially clarify the sometimes misleading and inflationary used terminology in the field.
Second language acquisitionis the term used for the field of science originating in the US, which is rooted in first language acquisition (FLA) research (cf. Edmondson and House 2000:15). Since the work of Krashen (1978, 1982, inter alia) it is sometimes distinguished between the two notionslearningandacquisitionof languages, whereas the former implies that learners experience a language in a conscious process, which is in a way controlled and explicit (by instruction), the latter refers to the process undergone by learners who are exposed to language in a natural environment, which is then acquired unconsciously and intuitively (through social contact). Due to terminological inconsistency in the literature, SLA
3Actually, the origins of the systematic study of language learning can be traced back to the end of the 19thcentury (cf. Edmondson and House 2000:16).
