The Influence of Learner’s First Languages to Using English Article

  1. Title of Project: The influence of learner’s first languages to using English article.
  2. Aims The purpose of this study is explore how the language similarity affects on employing English article.
  3. Rationale English became an essential part of our life. It can be said that it is impossible to find the countries which do not teach English in their public education systems and this phenomenon leads to a lot of study about leaning English as a second language. Unfortunately, every single person has not the same condition of learning English. The learning foreign language is influenced by situation, educational background and their mother language. It makes people harder or easier to use the second language even though they learn other languages because the typological distance influences the performance in L2. The knowledge of linguistic which is referred to linguistic competence is different from the behavior called linguistic performance. (Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman and Nina Hyams 2005). In this research, I will focus on the typological distance especially using English articles between Korean and Italian learners. There are various articles in Italian article system such as masculine while Korean does not have any article systems. The existence and non-existence of the concept of the article system may lead to people make more or less error in using English articles. This paper attempts to find this correlation through accuracy of using English articles by interview and test a Korean and an Italian. The exposed errors in the results may prove the hypothesis.
  4. Research design
  5. Research questions
  6. Do they have the knowledge about using English article?
  7. Which group (Koreans and Italians) does use English articles accurately in their language performance?
  8. Hypothesis
  9. Typological distance may influence on employment of English articles.
  10. Both an Italian and a Korean have enough knowledge about using English article.
  11. An Italian would make less error in using English articles than a Korean.
  12. Subject and data

The subjects are an Italian and a Korean who are 22 to 25 ages. They have stayed in Australia over 1 year and pass through the intermediate English class. These targets are expected to show different level of accuracy of testing.

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  1. Methodology

Interview would be used for data elicitation. The material of the interview is ‘spot the difference tasks’ (Di Biase B. and Kawaguchi S., 2004).

Each interview would take from 15 to 30 minutes. Describing picture will be recorded and transcribed. Two transcriptions which are from a Korean and an Italian would be compared.

 

‘Fill out the blanks’ and objective test help the investigator to recognize the knowledge of English articles of participants. The test paper would quoted from published test books or be made by the investigator. It also may be the standard for part of performance.

 

The differences of the interview and the test are that the result of the former may indicate level of performance while that of the latter shows the knowledge.

 

  1. Limitation of the research

This paper focuses on individual differences. Therefore, investigating the topic in groups may lead different results. In addition, different age people for example 30 or 40 year old Italians and Koreans could be different. It only focuses on English articles so it is hard to say that the result implies their overall English performance.

 

  1. References

Di Biase B. & Kawaguchi, S. (2005). Second Language Acquisition: Note Reading and Exercises, Campbelltown, NSW: College fo Arts, Education and Scial Sciences, School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Western Sydney.

Fromkin Victoria, Rodman, Robert & Hyams, Nina M., (2007). An introduction to language, 8th ed., Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth

Pienemman M., Di Biase B., Kawaguchi S. (2005).. Chapter 3: Processability, typological distance and L1 transfer. In Manfred Pienemann(Eds.), Cross-Linguistic Aspects of Processability Theory (pp.85-116), Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub.