engleski

The Impact of German on English Morphosyntactic Errors by German L1 Speakers

English and German both belong to the same language family, but started developing separately at a point in the past. That is why today speakers of one of the two languages have some difficulties learning the other one. Due to a lot of similar and different concepts errors occur easily. The paper deals with second language acquisition of German speakers. The aim of the survey was to examine the errors they make when acquiring English and the cause of this errors. The grammatical categories, which were analyzed, are those of noun-number and non-finite verb forms. The initial hypothesis was that errors are caused by the mental process of transfer, i.e. applying the structures of L1 to L2. The survey included three types of sentences: sentences that are correct in English, sentences that are incorrect in English and are produced under influence of German and sentences that are incorrect in English but are not under influence of German. The results indicate that German speakers make errors in English due to the process of negative transfer.

German; English; second language acquisition; morphosyntactic errors

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