Refereed Article
Definiteness in written Swedish by Finnish-speaking immersion pupils
at the end of immersion
A comparison with non-immersion pupils
There are two primary goals for this study – first, to analyse definiteness
and article use in spontaneous writing in Swedish by 15-year-old Finnish
immersion students (n = 162) and secondly, to compare their
performance with that of non-immersion students at the same age
(n = 67). Analyses at the group level show that immersion
students usually perform significantly better than the control group, but they
also reveal similar problems to what L2-Swedish non-immersion students have
demonstrated in previous studies, such as omission of indefinite articles and
difficulty in choosing the right definite form of the noun. Still, these
inaccuracies occurred less often in the data from the immersion students. The
studied constructions also show at the group level an acquisition order similar
to that reported in previous studies, explainable by different aspects of
complexity and cross-linguistic influence. Analyses on the individual level,
however, show different acquisition orders depending on the criteria being
used.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction and background
- 2.Background to the study
- 2.1Definiteness and article use in Swedish and Finnish
- 2.2Previous research
- 2.2.1Acquisition of definiteness in L2 Swedish
- 2.2.2Usage-based grammar and feature-related difficulty
- 3.The Study
- 3.1Study informants
- 3.2Data collection
- 3.3Research questions and hypotheses
- 3.4Data analysis
- 4.Results – group level analysis
- 4.1Frequency analysis
- 4.2Normative analysis
- 4.2.1Indefinite NPs
- 4.2.2Definite NPs
- 5.Results – individual level analysis
- 5.1Systematic use
- 5.2The percentage criterion
- 6.Discussion
- Notes
-
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