The Acquisition of English dative alternation by Turkish adult learners of English

iiiABSTRACTTHE ACQUISITION OF ENGLSH DATIVE ALTERNATIONBY TURKISH ADULT LEARNERS OF ENGLISHM. Pınar BABANOĞLUMaster Thesis, English Language Teaching DepartmentAdvisor: Asst. Prof. Dr. Cem CANJuly, 2007, 98 pagesWithin the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, Interlanguage(IL) development and the nature of linguistic systems that L2 learners have becomeimportant components. In this respect, other related issues of IL development as nativelanguage factor for transfer situation, and effects of cross linguistic differences betweenlanguages have expanded the interest of the inquiry.This study investigates the IL development of Turkish adult learners of Englishin terms of the IL features they employed and L1 effect on their IL. The L2 process ofDative Structure in English is examined in respect of questioning the IL assumptions.The questions of the research are:1. Do Turkish learners of English acquire [_ NP PP] constructions or [_ NP NP]constructions before?2. Do positional L1 features negatively affect learners? use of the verbs requiringpreposition for instead of to?3. Does the learners? success with these forms increase gradually along with theirproficiency levels?The study was conducted with 100 students studying ELT at ÇukurovaUniversity, who were classified into two levels of English proficiency as intermediateand advanced on the results of the Michigan Placement Test. Written data werecollected through grammaticality judgement and sentence construction tasks. Inaddition, two standard and international corpora, namely TICLE and LOCNESS, wereutilized as data collection tools.ivKeywords: Second Language Acquisition, Interlanguage, Dative Alternation in English