engleski

Kids and Structure: What Young Learners Know about Word Order in English

Word order is part of essential grammar that underlies successful communication. Thus, it can provide linguistic cues that make it easier for young learners to guess meaning. Whereas Croatian is open to various positions of subject, verb and object within the sentence, English has a rather fixed word order (the well known SVO – subject, verb, object) which leaves little room for structural creativity, especially at the elementary level. For example, it is quite possible in Croatian to produce sentences which would translate as 1) Maja likes flowers, 2) *Maja flowers likes, 3) *Likes Maja flowers, etc., while the only acceptable word order in English would be the SVO of the first sentence. Since English grammar is not explicitly taught to young learners from 1st to 4th grade of elementary school, it is interesting to look into students’ acquisition of the basic syntactic structure of the English language. This is important because if children are aware that the English word order is fixed, it can help them understand as well as form sentences in that language, i.e. by knowing that affirmative clauses rarely part from the “who does what to whom” order. This presentation discusses results of a small-scale research aimed at finding out what young learners (9 – 11 years) of English as a foreign language know about word order in English. The results show that the majority of participants recognize that English sentences deviating from the SVO word order are not correct.

word order ; fixed word order ; young learners of English as a foreign language

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