L2 to L1 Transfer in the Use of Clause-Initial Constituents in the Writing of Students of English Language and Culture
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2018-07-09
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en
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This study focusses on L2 to L1 transfer in the writing of Dutch students of English Language and Culture. It predicts that Dutch students of English during their study, due to the intense exposure and teaching of English, will gradually gravitate towards the English preferences regarding clause-initial constituents, and therefore become more aware of which and how many adverbials they place in first position. A Dutch and native English speaker corpus will be used as a reference. The research questions are: 1) How does the writing of native English speakers compare to the writing of Dutch students of other subjects than English in terms of clause-initial constituents? 2) How does the writing of Dutch students of other subjects than English and of native English speakers compare to the Dutch writing of Dutch students of English in terms of clause-initial constituents? 3) How does the Dutch writing of Dutch students of English develop over the course of their study in terms of clause-initial constituents? This was studied by doing corpus research on texts from the LONGDALE, LOCNESS and a self-collected corpus. The results show that the native English speakers used less clause-initial adverbials than the Dutch students, more clause-initial subjects, and no clause-initial objects at all. In comparison to the data of the Dutch students of English, it showed that in year 1 the students were in between the two sets of data in terms of the number of clause-initial subjects and adverbials used. The longitudinal development showed that from year 1 to year 2 the number of clause-initial adverbials used decreased, while the number of subjects decreased, but that this development was ‘reset’ again in year 3.
Keywords: L2 to L1 transfer, longitudinal development, sentence structure, clause-initial constituents.
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