| dc.description.abstract | Grammar is an important part of the process of language acquisition, and this thesis
investigates the hypothesis regarding subject-verb agreement being the bottleneck of
second language acquisition. My study is conducted on the data provided by the
research group TRAWL, comprised by 19 participants who have handed in texts in both
L2 English and L3 Spanish during their years of English and Spanish instruction enrolled
in either lower- or upper secondary schools around Norway. Afterward, I handpicked
the data from TRAWL necessary for my sub corpus and investigation. From there, I
analyzed the data manually, and then I discussed the results.
The goal with my thesis was to investigate whether or not subject-verb
agreement was indeed the bottleneck in L2 acquisition, as there are studies who have
looked at morphosyntax in different aspects, which led me to assume that I would find
many S-V agreement errors produced by L1 Norwegian learners in both the L2 English
and the L3 Spanish.
My results show that L1 Norwegian learners of L2 English and L3 Spanish in
Norwegian lower- and upper secondary schools do produce SVA agreement errors in the
respective languages. However, the results do not confirm the theory that subject-verb
agreement is the bottleneck of L2 acquisition. However, the results indicate that within
SVA, pupils make the most omission errors in L2 English production. In Spanish
however, the results show that 40% of the errors are due to overgeneralization errors,
where the pupils use plural subject, but fail to inflect the verb according to the subject. | |
