Second language acquisition of English articles feature-based analysis
Date
2018-03Author
Salman, Hasan Ali Hasan
Publisher
University of BahrainAbstract
Morphological variability in generative second language acquisition has been a controversial
debate among researchers in recent years. This thesis investigates the reasons for morphological
variability in relation to the acquisition of the English articles by Bahraini Arabic speakers.
Following the Feature Reassembly Approach (Lardiere, 2005), it examines how the features
associated with the English and Arabic articles can affect their acquisition. The feature re-
assembly hypothesis claims that second language challenges result not from the simple metaphor
of resetting parameters but from a failure in feature reassembly. It assumes that it is the
reconfiguration of features from the way they are assembled in the native language into new
formal configurations in the target language that causes variation among non-native speakers. It
is well established in the related literature that the L2 acquisition of the English article system
poses learnability difficulties for Arab learners due to the different functions of this area in both
languages.
In this study, the researcher focuses on how the article system functions in English and Arabic,
the similarities across the two languages and the possible sources of variability for Bahraini
learners in using this linguistic aspect. This is achieved through collecting data using two of the
most commonly used measures in formal models, i.e. two elicitation tasks which include a
grammaticality judgement test and a translation test. The study includes three groups; a group of
26 freshman Bahraini learners of English from University of Bahrain, a group of 26 fourth-year
Bahraini learners of English and a control group comprising 10 English native speakers. The
researcher found the results to conform with the predictions of the FRH: the source of problems
Bahraini L2 learners encounter is not so much acquiring new features as reconfiguring the
existing features from their L1 into new different lexical items in the L2.