STUDENTS LEARNING ENGLISH AS SECOND LANGUAGE: AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS LEARNING STUDY
Journal Title: Problems of Education in the 21st Century - Year 2009, Vol 18, Issue 12
Abstract
This study involved students from a teacher training programme and classroom teachers during in-service training. These students and teachers were introduced to variation theory and carried out a learning study on English as a Second Language (ESL) that incorporated fve research lessons taught in parallel, rather than in a cycle. The participants in the study were fve classes from grade level fve to upper secondary school, fve university students, and two researchers. The aim was to put learning study to test in describing in what ways students (from ffth graders to upper secondary school students) discerned the letter s at the end of a word, and secondly what kind of knowledge about this learning object they were able to develop during instruction. When an s appears as a terminal letter in English, it can be interpreted in at least fve different ways: contraction, plural, third person singular, genitive or possessive pronoun. It can also be the fnal letter of a monomorphemic word (bass) or suffx (-ness). Our study demonstrated how learning study was used to describe how students of different ages interpret the suffx s. A pattern emerged indicating the way knowledge of a phenomenon develops as a consequence of teaching. This pattern was analysed in terms of the structure of the students’ native language. The outcome showed how students tried to comprehend a second language by means of the structure of the frst. A good example is the pronoun your (dependent possessive form) and yours (independent possessive form). As there is no variation in Swedish between dependent and independent possessives, students associate the two forms with the differences between d- and t- gender. This distinction is made in Swedish (din/ditt) but not in modern English.
Authors and Affiliations
Mona Holmqvist, Gunilla Lindgren
Keywords
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