Use Of Subject-verb Agreement Research Articles

‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters

Abstract This paper presents a case study based on the writing of James Horner, one of the many Irish emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Communication between Horner and his family back in Ireland was kept through personal correspondence. His letters, which contain about 14,000 words in total, are part of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), and they provide detailed accounts of his experiences and impressions of the recently adopted country. They also show progressive standardisation, which makes them an interesting site for historical sociolinguistic analysis: shifting from vernacular Irish English towards a more standardised type of English to some degree. Our study focuses on the use of subject-verb agreement and addresses the following research questions: does geographical and social mobility condition Horner’s speech? If so, how does an individual’s social status affect language? The findings reported below show that social mobility as well as dialect contact seem to have contributed to general standardisation and the subsequent blurring of identity markers in language use. The paper, thus, offers new perspectives on the analysis of intra-speaker variation using historical data and contributes to the discussion of the need for this type of micro-analysis in the area of historical sociolinguistics.

Language activation in dual language schools: the development of subject-verb agreement in the English and Spanish of heritage speaker children

ABSTRACT Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. “Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/.” First Language 25: 317-333; Pérez-Leroux, A. T. 2005. “Number Problems in Children.” In Proceedings of the 2005 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association, edited by C. Gurski, 1-12. https://cla-acl.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/actes-2005/Perez-Leroux.pdf). In heritage speakers, Spanish agreement morphology shows optionality due to reduced input, especially when children transition to English schooling (i.e. Montrul, S. 2004. The Acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic Development in Monolingual and Bilingual L1 Acquisition and Adult L2 Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Jacobson, P. 2012. “The Effects of Language Impairment on the use of Direct Object Pronouns and Verb Inflections in Heritage Spanish Speakers: A Look at Attrition, Incomplete Acquisition and Maintenance.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15 (1): 22–38). We investigate how simultaneous heritage bilingual children’s interpretation and use of subject-verb agreement in English and Spanish may be modulated by increased input and activation of Spanish in dual language education (DLE). 125 participants aged 3–7 (42 heritage children, 40 English monolinguals, 39 Spanish-dominant children) took part in a fill-in-the-blanks task and a picture-matching task. In English, bilingual comprehension accuracy surpassed that of the monolinguals. In Spanish, bilingual production lagged behind that of the Spanish-dominant children and language output was found to be a greater predictor of productive accuracy than increased activation of Spanish in DLE. The implications of these results for theories of bilingualism and DLE are discussed.

The Effect of English Language Proficiency Level on Undergraduate Libyan Students’ Use of Subject Verb Agreement

This study aims to examine the proficiency level of Libyan EFL (English as a Foreign Language) undergraduate students in terms of the types of subject-verb agreement errors they commit. It also attempts to identify, analyze and categorize the frequency errors related to subject-verb agreement into three categories. These errors are statically analyzed and classified into: subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors with third person singular subjects (TPSS), with third person plural subjects (TPPS), with compound subjects (CS). The participants of this study were 40 intermediate and advanced students whose major is English at the Faculty of Arts in Misurata University, Libya. They were chosen based on their level of English language proficiency during the current study. The data of this study were collected through a written test consisting of six short passages. The results showed that the percentage of errors made by both groups was below 30% which refers to non-significant differences among the two groups with respect to the SVA errors made by them. Consequently, it can be concluded that language proficiency has little effect on the participants' use of the SVA rule. It was also found that subject-verb agreement errors with (TPPS) were the least frequent, and the most common errors committed were (CS) and (TPSS). This study is important for EFL teachers to be aware of the subject verb agreement errors that their target learners commonly produce. The implications for SLA research and classroom teaching practice are given for foreign language teachers and researchers.

Error Types in Malaysian Lower Secondary School Student Writing: A Corpus-Informed Analysis of Subject-Verb Agreement and Copula be

The issue of English language proficiency among Malaysian students has always been a subject of ongoing discussion among educators. While English is taught as a second language in primary and secondary schools, many students, especially those from rural areas, have problems using the language correctly. Also, it has been said that students' English language proficiency in most rural contexts takes on the quality of a foreign language rather than a second language. The current study addresses this problem by examining the use of Subject-Verb Agreement and copula be in essays written by 32 Malay lower secondary school students from a rural school in Kedah state, Malaysia. Using corpus-linguistic approach, this study compiled 128 essays and tagged them with online part-of-speech (POS) UCREL CLAWS tagger. This is a novel attempt in integrating Error Analysis (EA) framework with a corpus tagging approach to examine error patterning in learner writing. Using corpus-based techniques, this study identifies and analyses errors associated with SVA and copula be in Malaysian lower secondary school student writing. The findings showed that student writings were riddled with various types of errors, namely misselection, omission, blends, and overinclusion. Based on these findings, this study offers pedagogical suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of the language. Keywords: learner writing; Error Analysis; Subject-Verb Agreement; copula be ; part-of-speech tagging

USING CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING TASKS TO HELP BASIC SCHOOL PUPILS TAKE CONTROL OF THEIR LEARNING OF SUBJECT-VERB-AGREEMENT (SVA)

This research work was aimed at investigating the effect of consciousness-raising (CR) tasks on basic school pupils’ understanding and use of SVA. The study was conducted at a Basic School in the Assin North Municipality in the Central Region of Ghana to find out whether CR which has been used in a science lesson will produce positive impact in English Language lessons. All the 30 Junior High School pupils were purposively sampled to participate in the study. Since the problem was a classroom issue that required immediate attention, action research design was used. Data collection occurred at three stages; pre-intervention stage, intervention stage and post-intervention stage. A pre-intervention test was designed to test the pupils’ understanding of SVA. Intervention activities were carried out after the pre-intervention test using the consciousness-raising tasks. A post-test was conducted after the intervention to find out the impact of the intervention on pupils’ performance in SVA. The findings of the study showed that varied SVA rules and types, rules not well explained and teachers’ unsuitable teaching methods and confusion towards SVA teaching are some of the causes of pupils’ difficulty in mastering SVA concept among the basic school pupils used for the study. The data collected showed that CR tasks are effective in promoting learner’s accurate use of Subject-Verb-Agreement (SVA) in a relaxed condition. Article visualizations:

El feedback correctivo escrito indirecto en el tratamiento de la concordancia sujeto-verbo en tercera persona singular entre estudiantes de Inglés como le

Este artículo presenta los resultados de un estudio acerca de la efectividad de la corrección indirecta del error escrito o feedback correctivo escrito indirecto, en la promoción del uso preciso de la concordancia sujeto-verbo en tercera persona singular entre estudiantes con un nivel elemental de competencia lingüística, que aprenden inglés como lengua extranjera a nivel escolar. La muestra estuvo constituida por 39 estudiantes de 8° año de un colegio particular pagado de la región del Biobío, Chile, a quienes se le aplicó un pretest, un posttest-inmediato y un posttest diferido. Los resultados demuestran que la técnica de corrección utilizada representa una herramienta efectiva para la promoción del uso gramaticalmente preciso de la concordancia sujeto-verbo aun cuando los estudiantes poseen un nivel básico de competencia en la lengua extranjera.

SYNTACTICAL ERROR ANALYSIS ON REPORT TEXT

This study aims at investigating and classifying the syntactical errors in the writing of report text made by 20 students of Department of English Literature of FIB-USU. Syntactical errors in writing made by EFL students are needed to be investigated by using the Error Analysis theory developed by Gass & Selinker in 2008 as it provides six appropriate investigation procedures, namely; collecting data, identifying errors, classifying errors, quantifying errors, analyzing errors and remediation. Each of students was assigned to write a topic-based report text with the length of 150 up to 250 words in count. This study dealt with a qualitative descriptive approach. After the EA procedures applied, in this study found that the students made major syntactical errors within the use of article ‘a/an’,’ the’ in terms of omission and addition of articles, the use of relative pronoun, and the use of subject-verb agreement in terms of past tense agreement and number agreement. Based on the error analysis procedure applied, it was obtained that the most predominant syntactical errors made by the students was the use of article which comprises of 125 errors (50.2%), followed by the use of subject-verb agreement with 117 errors (47%) and followed by the use of relative pronoun as the least error which comprises of 7 errors (2.8%). The syntactical error made by the students caused by two major sources, intra-language error and intra-language error. By seeing at these problematic areas, the researcher has suggested to take out several related pedagogical remediation to the students.

Grammatical errors of writing in EFL class

The current paper is descriptive qualitative research which aimed at describing grammatical errors of students’ writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Class. Data were gained from documents written by students of State Polytechnic in Kupang City, East Nusa Tenggara- Indonesia. The results have shown that the highest percentage of grammatical errors occurred in using the verb group. It consisted of 65.0 %. Following these errors, students made errors in the use of prepositions (12.8 %). The third errors that were usually made by students were the errors in the use of pronouns. It took 9.8 %. After errors in the use of pronouns, students made errors in pluralization (5.1 %). The next lower frequency of errors made by students were errors in the use of articles. It took 4.3 % of the whole text. Following that, students made errors in the use of conjunctions. The errors occurred at 1.7 %. The last errors made by students were errors in the use of subject-verb agreement. The errors occurred only 1.3 %. The results of the current analysis are hoped to be a reflection of EFL lecturers in Indonesia. Furthermore, EFL lecturers of State Polytechnic Kupang are hoped to focus more on teaching the use of verbs in writing class.

Children's understanding of speaker reliability between lexical and syntactic knowledge.

Many studies suggest that preschoolers rely on individuals' histories of generating accurate lexical information when learning novel lexical information from them. The present study examined whether children used a speaker's accuracy about one kind of linguistic knowledge to make inferences about another kind of linguistic knowledge, focusing specifically on syntax and the lexicon. In Experiment 1, we presented children with 2 live speakers who were lexically accurate, but differed in their appropriate use of subject-verb agreement. Older 4-year-olds, but not younger 4-year-olds, relied on the accurate speaker to learn new labels for novel objects. We suggest only the older 4-year-olds might have registered that the inaccurate speaker was an unreliable source of novel linguistic information. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds observed 2 speakers whose utterances were syntactically accurate, but differed in lexical accuracy. All 4-year-olds used the speakers' accuracy to guide how they learned novel lexical information and novel irregular plurals, but not how they learned novel irregular past tense forms that children often regularize. These results suggest that when learning novel syntactic information, reliability information might interact with underlying linguistic regularity.

The development of sentence comprehension in Italian: a reaction time study

We investigate developmental changes in the nature and timing of sentence interpretation in Italian, focusing on the contributions of morphological, syntactic and semantic information to the assignment of agent-object roles. College students and children between 5 and 10 years of age were asked to decide 'who did the action?' in response to auditory sentences reflecting orthogonal combinations of subject-verb-agreement, word order and noun animacy. Analyses of both agent choice and reaction time provide support for the cue validity and cue strength predictions of the Competition Model, an interactive-activation theory of language processing and development. They also provide new information about reorganization and consolidation of sentence processing strategies in Italian children, including protracted changes from 5 years of age to adulthood in the use of subject-verb agreement, and a plateau in reaction times from 7 to 10 years of age, the period in which children make the transition from a primary reliance on animacy to the overwhelming reliance on morphological cues that characterizes sentence processing in Italian adults.

Processing Complex Sentences: A Cross-linguistic Study

The Competition Model is an interactive-activation framework for the study of sentence processing that is designed to handle quantitative as well as qualitative variations in performance across natural languages. Previous studies within this framework have shown that adult listeners base their interpretation of simple sentences on the most valid and reliable cues in their language (e.g. more use of word order in English and more use of subject verb agreement in Italian). Critics have argued that such effects may reflect heuristics that are only applied to simple sentences. The present study shows that these cross-linguistic differences are maintained when participants are asked to interpret complex sentences with an embedded relative clause. A comparison of “off-line” (untimed) and "on-line" (timed) versions of the same experiments shows that these effects hold up under time pressure. The on-line versions also provide new information about cross-linguistic differences in timing and demands on processing. In particular, the processing costs associated with centre embedding and non-canonical order are greater in English, which may be the price that English listeners have to pay for heavy reliance on word order information.