The markedness in acquiring do-support in negation and inversion by adult native-Arabic speakers learning English
The purpose of this study is to determine whether the markedness phenomenon of Do-support as a specificlanguage property poses greater difficulties for adult Arabic-speaking learners thereby bringing about more L1 transfer than the auxiliary verbs BE and HAVE. Do-support in the inter-language of a...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2017
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12861/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12861/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/12861/1/20240-65581-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | The purpose of this study is to determine whether the markedness phenomenon of Do-support as a specificlanguage
property poses greater difficulties for adult Arabic-speaking learners thereby bringing about more L1
transfer than the auxiliary verbs BE and HAVE. Do-support in the inter-language of adult native-Arabic
speakers learning English was insufficiently addressed despite the complexity and that Arabic lacks do-support
in negation and inversion. This study was conducted to address this gap within the theoretical framework of
Differential Markedness Hypothesis (DMH). A sample of 100 Jordanian students attending Mutah University
participated in the study where data was collected using a Multiple-Choice Task (MCT), and a Written
Production Task (WPT), involving semi-structured interviews with 30 students from the student sample. The
study used descriptive and inferential statistics to analyse the data where the findings showed a committed
relationship between the auxiliary type and degree of difficulty that learners in both groups experienced with
DO, BE and HAVE. Notably, Do-support poses greater difficulty compared to BE and HAVE where its usage is
problematic particularly for beginners, resulting in more incidences of the Arabic influence. The data from the
interviews support the results of the two tasks: learners find L2 marked features more difficult than L2 features,
which are universal and genuinely part of the syntactic structure. The findings in this study will contribute
towards a better understanding of how to develop an improved teaching process to more effective on the
markedness and difficulty of Do-support compared to BE and HAVE. |
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