Schedule StuTS 65

Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), which predicts the difficulty order of relative clauses (RCs) in second language acquisition, is one of the most robust hypotheses regarding RC acquisition. The present study tests the hierarchy predicted by the NPAH via examining the performance of learners of English with four different mother tongues. It aims to find out whether the NPAH can account for the accessibility hierarchy of English RCs set up based on the data obtained from Persian, Kurdish, Azeri, and German learners of English. Additionally, the study aims to measure the ability of English language learners with different L1 backgrounds in the production of English RCs in argumentative essays and to identify the accurate, erroneous, and avoided types of RCs in each L1 group. To this end, for each of the four L1s a corpus of student essays was compiled and analyzed. Based on the frequency of RC types in each corpus, a frequency hierarchy of RCs was set up, which was then compared to the hierarchy predicted by the NPAH. With regard to the use, overuse, and underuse of RC types, some similarities and differences between the four groups of the study were noticed. However, on the whole, the aggregate results of the analysis supported the NPAH.

Info

Day: 2019-05-24
Start time: 14:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: 114 / Seminarraum links
Track: Applied linguistics
Language: en

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