چکیده:
Unlike Lexical Projections, Functional Projections (Extended Projections) are more of an ‘abstract’ in nature. Therefore, Functional Projections seem to be acquired later than Lexical Projections by the L2 learners. The present study investigates Iranian L2 learners’ acquisition of English Extended Projections taking into account their level of grammatical proficiency. Specifically, the aim is to identify the level of grammatical proficiency at which the acquisition of Extended Projections could occur in the process of learning English by the Iranian students. Two hundred and seventy Iranian female L2 learners of English participated in this study. Participants were administered three tests with a ten-day interval between each test. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to classify the participants’ level of grammatical proficiency. Second, a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) was administered in order to assess the learners’ ability to recognize grammatical problems in Extended Projections. Finally, a picture description task (PDT) was administered to examine the learners’ ability to produce grammatical Extended Projections. The results indicated that the learners are able to recognize and produce English Extended Projections even at lower levels of grammatical proficiency. The results also showed that the learner’s recognition and production of English Extended Projection improves with their increased level of grammatical proficiency.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Level of Grammatical Proficiency and Acquisition of Functional Projections: The case of Iranian learners of English language Fariba Khorvash, Ph. D.
In this respect, the present study aims to investigate the level of grammatical proficiency Iranian learners of English can acquire the four English Extended Projections including Determiner Phrases (DPs), Infelectional Phrases (IPs), Negative Phrases (NegPs) and Complementiser Phrases (CPs).
Therefore, after classifying the participants into three groups of Low, Mid and High according to their proficiency scores, this study utilises Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and Picture Description Task (PDT) in order to assess the degree of acquisition of the above Extended Projections in each of the three groups.
Analysing each of the groups, the study attempted to answer the following research question: Q: At which level of grammatical proficiency are Extended Projections acquired by Iranian learners of English?
Yoshimura & Nakayama (2009) investigated the L1 influence on the syntactic or morphophonological domain by examining how Japanese college EFL learners (15 in Low Group and 15 in High Group) proceeded to acquire inflectional morphology (3rd person singular –s, plural –s and past tense –ed) in English.
Participants Methodology The current research is a descriptive study with the aim of assessing the acquisition of Extended Projections (DPs, IPs, NegPs, and CPs) among Iranian learners of English.
Recent studies have reported the effectiveness of explicit and form-focused instruction on acquiring grammatical knowledge, automaticity and fluency of language learners (Hernández, 2011; Lingli and Wannaruk, 2010; Parviz and Gorjian, 2013; Spada et al.
Grammatical proficiency and access to Extended Projections in Iranian learners of English as a second language.