Acquisition of L2 English inflectional system by Turkish native speakers: Rule-governed or rote-learned

Turkish students learning English as a foreign language are observed to havedifficulty in the establishment of inflectional morphemes. The aim of this study is to explorethe representation of L2 grammatical morphemes by Turkish students learning English andthe way they develop morphological knowledge. The focus is on learning and using past tenseverbs, three -s morphemes (third person singular -s, possessive -s, plural -s),copula, andauxiliary be.This study focuses on the following research questions:1- What aspects of inflectional morphology in English as a second language (L2) causeproblems in learning by Turkish (L1) speakers?2- How do the three -s morphemes: plural, possessive, and third person occur in thelanguage of Turkish speakers in L2?3- Does the order of copula be and auxiliary be change in the acquisition of English byTurkish speakers?4- How is acquisition of past tense morphemes explained in terms of Words and Rulestheory in L2 setting?The participants of the this study are from the elementary level students of Research andApplication Centre for Foreign Languages (YADİM) at Çukurova University. Written andspoken data were collected through free writing tasks, picture telling task and interviews.Key Words: Second Language Acquisition, Inflectional Morphology, Morpheme Order,Rule-Governed or Rote-Learned