Chapter 8
Proficiency and transfer effects in the acquisition of gender agreement by L2 and L3 English learners
The present study examines proficiency and transfer effects in the acquisition of gender agreement in third person singular possessives (his/her) by second (L2) and third language (L3) learners of English. Within current generative second language acquisition research, gender agreement has been found to be a complicated feature to acquire for non-native language learners. A group of Basque/Spanish speakers (n = 117) and a group of Spanish speakers (n = 70) divided into three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) completed two written (a fill in the gap task and a written description task) two oral production tasks (an oral elicitation and a picture description). Our findings show that previous linguistic knowledge and proficiency level in English seem to have an influence on the type of errors attested in the L2 and the L3 groups.
Article outline
- The present study
- Participants
- Experimental materials and tasks
- Procedure
- Data coding
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Luquin, María & María del Pilar García Mayo
2023.
The impact of textual enhancement on the acquisition of third person possessive pronouns by child EFL learners.
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 0:0
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Mayo, María del Pilar García & María Luquin
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