Literacy in the Development of L2 English Morpho syntax

Abstract

The course of second language (L2) morpho-syntactic development is said to be uniform, regardless of learners' L1, type of exposure or education. We argue that this conclusion is premature and explore these variables with new cross-sectional data from an ongoing study of Arabic, Somali and Urdu-speaking English learners with varying amounts of home-language and English literacy whose exposure to English was only after post-puberty immigration. While seminal studies of adult immigrants' naturalistic L2 acquisition have included low-educated adults, instruction not literacy was a variable. There is emerging evidence of different rates and developmental sub-patterns for L2 immigrant adults but it is unclear whether the influence is exposure type or literacy. The structure building approach predicts grammatical elements are acquired in their order in the target syntactic tree, and in English crucial are word order, negation, tense and agreement. Given the standard syntactic structure of English, the predicted order of acquisition (1) word order of the VP projection; (2) sentential negation (NegP); (3) regular past tense marking (TP); (4) subject-verb agreement, including 3rd person singular (AgrP). Data come from speakers' oral production in response to a set of tasks. Results support the predicted order of development for L2 English learners regardless of their L1. Results also reveal subtle individual differences in over-production of suffixes such as -ing and -s which can only partly be traced to learners' level of home language and L2 English literacy.