An Investigation of English Structure Rules in Adult Learners of English as a Second Language

Following Corder's (1981) suggestion for the use of intuitional data and building on the study by Schachter, Tyson, and Diffley (1976) of learners' judgements of grammaticality, adult students of English as a Second Language were asked to correctly judge the grammaticality of English sentences containing eight selected preposition structure errors. The errors were selected from compositions written by Spanish speakers of varying English ability. The sentences were presented in three test formats: a paired-comparison task, an isolated rating task, and a multiple-choice task. Contrastive analysis was used to hypothesize a sequence of acquisition for three pairs from among the selected errors. Eight three-way analyses of variance were performed with combined scores for each structure as the dependent variable and with first language background (Spanish or non-Spanish), TOEFL group (high or low), and test type (I, II, or III) as the independent variables. The following error structures were found to be attributable, in part, to Spanish language interference:

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Pluto, Joseph A.

• Education, Language and Literature

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8302964

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/71900