The Acquisition Of English Dative Alternation By Turkish Adult Learners Of English
The Acquisition Of English Dative Alternation By Turkish Adult Learners Of English

Summary/Abstract: Within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, Interlanguage (IL) development has become an important component. In this respect, other related issues of IL development as native language factor for transfer situation, and effects of cross linguistic differences between languages have expanded the interest of the inquiry. This study investigates the IL development of Turkish adult learners of English in terms of the IL features they employed and L1 effect on their IL, regarding SLA theories. Primary purpose of the study is to examine IL grammar of Turkish adult learners of English considering similarities and differences between learners’ acquisition process, the effect of Turkish as native language and learners’ attitudes that can be accepted as language learning strategies. For this purpose, Dative alternation structures in English have been investigated through various learner data elicited from tests and corpus data. Research findings indicated that there is no significant difference in the use of dative structures between learners with different proficiency levels. On the other hand, overgeneralization and undergeneralization of some certain structures have been identified in terms of IL grammar properties and L1 transfer samples.

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