Abstract
The study examines the acquisition of English prepositions by Sinhala speaking learners of English with respect to four fine-grained categories of prepositions found by Littlefield (2006) using first language acquisition of English speaking children. The acquisition order of these four categories found by Littlefield: adverbial prepositions [+Lexical, -Functional], particles [-Lexical, -Functional], semi-lexical prepositions [+Lexical, +Functional], and functional prepositions [- Lexical, +Functional], showed an advantage of [-Functional] features over the [+ Functional] features. One of the aims of the study was to find out whether this ranking was good for learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in tasks that tap comprehension knowledge (dictation task). The second aim was to see whether at initial stages of learning, there was an advantage of either [+Lexical] features or [-Functional] features, which disappeared at later stages of learning. 316 Sinhala speaking learners of English studying in Grades 4, 6, 8 and 10 answered a dictation task with 40 sentences, 10 each with adverbial prepositions, semi-lexical prepositions, particles and functional prepositions. Sentence length and structure was controlled and sentences differed only in the category of preposition used in them. The main findings of this task were as follows: (1) ESL learners imitated the four categories of prepositions differently in the dictation task. (2) [+Lexial] prepositions were better imitated than [-Lexical] prepositions initially, and this ‘lexical’ advantage disappeared in Grade 10 with all categories being used with comparable accuracy. These findings are recommended to be used in the ESL classroom to facilitate teaching prepositions.
Highlights
The study examines the acquisition of English prepositions by Sinhala-speaking learners of English as a second language, with special reference to the lexicalfunctional divide proposed by Littlefield (2006) for prepositions
Given the fact that lexical categories are known to be easier than functional categories, we hypothesized that: (ii) Sentences with [+Lexical] prepositions would be imitated better than the sentences with [-Lexical] prepositions (Hypothesis 2). (iii) By Grade 10, all prepositional categories will be imitated well. (Hypothesis 3) As there are clear cut difficulties for the second language learners in the acquisition of English prepositions, we hypothesized that: (iv) There would be differences in second language acquisition data compared with first language data reported in Littlefield (2009). (Hypothesis 4)
Under the findings of this study, category-wise performance shows that the English as a Second Language (ESL) learners of Grade 4, 6 and 8 had imitated sentences with four categories differently ( F> 4.2 at p < 0.001) and by Grade 10, there is no significant difference in the imitation of sentences with four categories (F (3, 256) = 1.75, p < 0.157)
Summary
The study examines the acquisition of English prepositions by Sinhala-speaking learners of English as a second language, with special reference to the lexicalfunctional divide proposed by Littlefield (2006) for prepositions. This paper initially addresses on the theoretical and empirical literature review on the categorization of prepositions using [±Lexical, ±Functional] categories and the complexities around this categorization. It presents a detailed description on Littlefield’s (2006) study. It discusses on the difficulties in acquiring prepositions in English as a second language, and on how to measure the order of acquisition of prepositions of ESL learners It addresses on the methodology of the research in order to meet the objectives mentioned in the abstract, followed by its findings. It concludes with a discussion on the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the research findings
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