The Acquisition Of English Passives By Cantonese Esl Learners PDF Download

This dissertation, "The Acquisition of English Subject-verb Agreement by Cantonese Speakers" by 羅美嫻, Mei-han, Crystal, Law, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract Second language acquisition (SLA) is the study of how second languages are learned. It investigates how people acquire another language which is not their native language. Many have argued that SLA research has important contributions to make to an understanding of the mature of language and human cognition. It is generally accepted that in progressing to the grammar of the second language, learners have their own version of the second language called 'interlanguage'. Interlanguage resembles part of the grammar of the second language as well as the first language. Based on the notion of interlanguage, it is expected that learners will make mistakes since the interlanguage of learners have not yet fully attained the grammar of the second language. Cantonese does not have functional equivalents of the English Subject-verb agreement. Correspondingly, there is plenty of observational evidence that Cantonese speakers have difficulty with Subject-verb agreement system in English. For instance, Chinese secondary learners have great difficulties in learning tenses. Levinson(1983) points in Chinese without true tenses the concept of time is expressed by adverbs as well as other implicit and contextual assumptions. In this thesis, the written production as well as grammaticality judgment data obtained from native Cantonese speakers acquiring English as a second language was examined. The grammar errors which were related to Subject-verb agreement mainly about singular & plural, tense, negation and interrogation were selected as the target iii 5grammar items. The finding of F2 and F5 subjects were compared in order to explore the language development among adolescents. This thesis aimed at studying the acquisition of English Subject-Verb agreement by native Cantonese speakers. One of the objectives was to examine and describe the production of English Subject-Verb agreement and to provide an explanation of the phenomena found. Moreover, the learning experience and its effect on second language acquisition were also investigated in this thesis. vi DOI: 10.5353/th_b3162776 Subjects: English language - Study and teaching - Cantonese speakers English language - Study and teaching (Secondary) - China - Hong Kong Second language acquisition