The learning of English grammatical morphemes by Japanese high school students

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the learning of English grammatical morphemes (copula, possessive, ING, plural, progressive auxiliary, irregular-past, regular-past, definite article, indefinite article, and the third-person-singular-present) by 31 Japanese high school students. The data were based on the results of the subjects' spoken language, which were tape-recorded and carefully investigated. The results indicated some similarities and differences between the present study and the previous L1 and L2 studies. The present study showed more similarities to the studies which dealt with Japanese subjects by both the Spearman rank order correlation coefficients and the Implicational Scaling Analysis based on Group Range. This indicates strong transfer from the Japanese language. But language transfer is not such a simple phenomena as the researchers in the Behaviorism era thought. Some methodological problems concerning the grammatical morpheme studies and possible determinants of the accuracy order of the morphemes were also discussed.