Acquisition of English syntactic movement by Turkish adult learners

This study aims at investigating L2 acquisition of syntactic movement in English nounclauses by Turkish adults. Recent studies in SLA domain have been influenced by theGenerative Grammar based approaches to a great extent. The question of whetherUniversal Grammar originally developed and proposed to account for first languageacquisition also constrains the acquisition of second language has been the majorconcern of the studies conducted in SLA field. However, as growing research into thisissue has not yielded clear-cut answers, L2 studies within the generative frameworkshifted from investigating this issue to whether interlanguage grammars exhibit naturallanguage characteristics.This study seeks answers to the following questions:1 Do Turkish adult L2 learners of English have problems in handling thesyntactic movement involved in noun clauses in English in their gradualproficiency level of English stemming from their L1 linguisticcharacteristics?2 Is there any order of acquisition between the noun clauses in subjectposition and object position along with the various WH-words?The study was conducted with 87 ELT students whose English proficiency levels weredetermined by Michigan Placement Test and ranged from intermediate to advanced.Three different data collection tools were utilized in order to collect data as well as twointernational corpora TICLE and LOCNESS.