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Article published In:
Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education
Vol. 6:1 (2018) ► pp.57–84
Refereed Article

Definiteness in written Swedish by Finnish-speaking immersion pupils at the end of immersion

A comparison with non-immersion pupils

 | University of Turku
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.
Keywords: immersion, noun phrases, definiteness, article use, Swedish, acquisition order, context-related difficulty, feature-related difficulty
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
  • References
Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jicb.17001.nyq
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