engleski

A Longitudinal Study of the Acquisition of Verbal Morphology in the EFL Classroom

This paper investigates the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in the interlanguage of Croatian pupils of English as a foreign language. The order of acquisition was longitudinally studied among the same group of 20 elementary school pupils over the period of three years. The order of acquisition was determined for the following grammatical morphemes: third person singular (–s), auxiliary verb be, progressive (–ing), past regular (–ed), past irregular, auxiliary verb have, past participle (–en), present tense copula be (am, are, is) and past tense copula be (was, were). Additionally, these were combined to form four tenses including the Simple Present Tense, the Present Continuous Tense, the Simple Past Tense and the Present Perfect Tense so as to determine the order of their emergence in the pupils’ verb-morphology repertoire. Special emphasis was put on the acquisition of regular compared to irregular morphology along with the acquisition of constituent elements of the compound verb tenses following the principles of tense-aspect acquisition (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000). The study was conducted on a corpus of 36 transcribed recordings of parts of classroom interaction. The pupils’ speech production was elicited by means of various task-based activities (Harmer, 1999 ; Ur, 1999). The suppliance of nine grammatical morphemes was examined in obligatory contexts (Brown, 1973) thus identifying their obligatory and correct use. The grammatical morphemes were then coded in the coding table developed by Larsen-Freeman (1975). The group score method (Dulay and Burt, 1974) was used to determine a rank order for each morpheme. The obtained results revealed progress in the acquisition of only the present tense copula be. The emergence of verb tenses was partly identified due to insufficient suppliance of the grammatical morphemes in the pupils’ speech production. The results have also partially confirmed that the pupils follow the principles of tense-aspect acquisition (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000).

order of acquisition; grammatical morphemes; tense-aspect acquisition; task-based activities; obligatory context

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