Analyzing errors in the use of inflectional morphemes by Pakistani young learners
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Date
2016
Authors
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Publisher
University of Management and Technology Lahore
Abstract
The research on acquisition of inflectional morphology in languages has been an area of
great interest for the last 40 years. Learners that achieve the high level of proficiency in
L2 feel uncertainty when it comes to grammatical inflections. The present study employs
Error analysis to identify deviations from the target language and proposes the more or
less problematic Inflectional morphemes. The data that comprised of 24 creative writing
journals of grade 5 students from Sicas Lahore was analyzed manually by the researcher.
The frequency and percentage were calculated in order to find the accuracy level of the
English inflectional morphemes. Moreover, the scatter plots were analyzed to reflect
upon the pattern of use of each inflectional morpheme by individual students. It is found
that there is a wide gap in the mastery of the inflectional morphemes. The most frequent
inflectional morpheme is the plural morpheme. Present participial has dominance over
the other verb forms. Scatter plots of the past tense and subject verb agreement reflect
that both of them are in the hypothesis testing phase of the error analysis but the
frequency of past tense inflection is almost five folds to the frequency of the subject-verb
agreement inflection. This indicates that subject- verb agreement poses more problems
for the learners. The comparative degree, superlative degree and the possessive inflection
have minimal occurrences but percentage accuracy is very high. That is the most striking
finding of the present study.
Description
Supervised by: Rao Jaleel
Keywords
Individual students, Plural morpheme, M.Phil Thesis