Second Language Acquisition of Syntactic Movement in English by Turkish Adult Learners

Abstract

There has been much discussion on the involvement of Universal Grammar (UG) in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) process. Despite growing research in the field, few precise answers to the problem have been suggested so far. Hence, recent L2 studies within the generative framework have shifted from investigating this issue to determining whether or not interlanguage grammars exhibit natural language characteristics (Can, Kilimci & Altunkol, 2007). The present study aimed to investigate L2 acquisition of syntactic movement in English noun clauses by Turkish adult learners. Accordingly, L1 involvement in SLA was sought through examining the upper intermediate Turkish learners' knowledge about the movement in question. The study addressed the questions of whether or not Turkish adult ESL learners have problems, stemming from L1 interference, with the construction of the syntactic movement in English noun clauses, and whether or not there is any order of acquisition between the noun clauses in subject position and object position along with various wh-words. The study reported related findings, and concluded with a few pedagogical implications for practice, and a couple of suggestions for further directions.

Polarity-item anything in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish?

“…There is some evidence of transfer in the acquisition of polarity items from the small body of previous non-native/bilingual language acquisition research in this area: Austin et al (2013), Agçam (2008), Can and Agçam (2011) and Gil et al (2011). 7 First, Austin et al (2013) investigated whether attrition occurs in the Spanish of Spanish–English bilingual 5–6-year-old children growing up in the USA.…”

“…Finally, Agçam (2008) and Can and Agçam (2011) report on an investigation of L2 acquisition of any by adult Turkish-speaking learners of English. They elicited any using a task in which participants completed a partial sentence such as (28a).…”

Targeting Turkish-to-English Interlingual Interference Through Context-Heavy Data-Driven Learning

“…Mede et al (2014), who investigated CLI issues with the acquisition of word order in terms of verb placement, found syntax to be a particular challenge. Agcam et al (2015), focusing on the learning of syntactic movement, found that learners face more problems when noun clauses do not include auxiliary verbs, and also when the movement is in the subject position as opposed to the object position. As can be seen, there is a degree of variance in the results of these studies into Turkish-to-English challenges.…”

“…However, the study did not return a similar result in the productive task which involved describing a picture (Balabakgil et al, 2015). Agcam et al (2015) also incorporated three task types into their study on the learning of syntactic movement by Turkish learners of English: a grammaticality judgment task, a scrambled sentence task, and an elicited imitation task. The results again suggested that task type variation affects findings significantly, with participants achieving higher accuracy rates in the grammaticality judgment test (Agcam et al, 2015).…”

“…As with foreign language learners of most language combinations, Turkish-speaking learners of English typically struggle with some common problems, as well as some seemingly more specific to their context. Past studies have focused upon, among other topics, speaking (see Yildiz, 2016), pronunciation (see Bardakci, 2015), listening comprehension (see İnceçay & Koçoğlu, 2017), grammar (see Agcam et al, 2015;Balabakgil et al, 2016;Erarslan & Hol, 2014), and writing (see Demirel, 2017), all of which are common problem areas for most foreign language learners. The causes of these issues are multitudinous and include foreign language anxiety (Çağatay, 2015;Thompson & Khawaja, 2016), teaching/training shortcomings (Solak & Bayar, 2015), and, naturally, language transfer (Erarslan & Hol, 2014;Mede et al, 2014).…”