Role of formal input exposure and onset age in grammaticality judgement
This study examines the effects of formal input exposure and the onset age of exposure on the performance of eleven different morphosyntactic structures in a foreign language setting. It studies whether being exposed to longer hours of formal language classes at a younger age is advantageous for I...
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM
2014
|
| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/7747/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/7747/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/7747/1/6465-18854-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | This study examines the effects of formal input exposure and the onset age of exposure on the performance of
eleven different morphosyntactic structures in a foreign language setting. It studies whether being exposed to
longer hours of formal language classes at a younger age is advantageous for Iranian EFL learners. Some
studies have claimed that there is no advantage for early starters and in the field of grammatical learning, later
starters perform better. Four groups of Iranian learners with different formal learning times participated in this
study: Groups A and B were public and private school students, respectively, whereas Groups C and D had
extra supplementary classes at language institutes as well. A Grammaticality Judgement Task (GJT) including
some grammatical structures which were claimed to be problematic for EFL learners, was used as a tool to
determine the possible differences in the performance of grammatical structures of the four groups. A two-way
ANCOVA and a one-way ANOVA were used to analyse the data. Results suggest that long hours of formal
exposure lead to better grammatical performance and the participants who started learning English at age 9 or
below performed better in the GJT. |
|---|