Morphemic Acquisition Order Testing in Third-person Inflection and Plural Sequence in Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis on Chinese International Students

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211020.296How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Natural Order Hypothesis, Morphemic Acquisition Order, Error Analysis, Contrastive Analysis, Structured Communication, Second Language Acquisition, Chinese International Students

Abstract

Since Krashen first introduced Natural Order Hypothesis (NOH) in 1980, many researchers started to test it among participants from different cultural backgrounds. NOH stated that human beings have a certain universal order to acquire their second language (L2). However, recent research articles for NOH testing after 2010 are rare. Over this decade, students’ learning environment and teachers’ teaching methods are rapidly changing. Whether students’ Natural Order for second language acquisition (SLA) still remains the same is the research topic for this paper. In this research, our target group is Chinese first language (L1) learners of English as an L2 who study in various English-speaking countries including Canada, Singapore, the United States, and the United Kingdom with abroad experience from 6 months to 8 years. Thirty interviews are collected to create a corpus and upon which to perform error analysis to test the comparative acquisition order of third-person inflection and plural. According to the comparison result of the percentage of errors made in third-person inflection and plural in the speech of one participant, the test subjects are categorized into three types. By comparing the number of test subjects in each category, our research concludes that this test strongly supports the hypothesis that third-person inflection occurs later than plural in the morphemic acquisition order. While probing into the reasons behind the number of test subjects in each category, this research discovered interesting findings which include the positive correlation between the length of studying abroad and the invisibility of acquisition order regarding the two target morphemes and possible interference of the place of residence during the interview to the test result. In addition, this research open the discussions on new norms of standard fixed phrases in the plural as a by-product of COVID-19. Furthermore, this research found and distinguished between different types of self-corrections in corpus while questioning the boundary between learned and acquired.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yu Bai
AU  - Ziqi Sun
AU  - Zhuang Yang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/10/21
TI  - Morphemic Acquisition Order Testing in Third-person Inflection and Plural Sequence in Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis on Chinese International Students
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Public Relations and Social Sciences (ICPRSS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1004
EP  - 1010
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211020.296
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211020.296
ID  - Bai2021
ER  -