An investigation into the acquisition of modal verbs by monolingual and bilingual learners of English

Language acquisition is defined as the process by which human beings acquire the capacity to perceive and understand language as well as to produce and use words and sentences. Modals constitute one of the most important grammatical areas in the English language. This master's thesis aims to examine the process of acquiring the English modal units of monolingual and bilingual individuals. The universe of the research consists of 9th grade students studying in Anatolian high schools in Batman. The research method has quantitative characteristics. The sample of the study consists of 80 students who are selected equally. Half of the selected participants are monolingual and the rest are bilingual. In this study, a test was used to measure the students' recognition and use of modal units. The test consists of two versions, which include the participants' recognition and production items that reveal the modal units. Each test consists of twenty-four items. Both tests were administered to participants who took the English course according to the curriculum of the Ministry of National Education for five years. SPSS 17 was used for data analysis. Data analysis was performed with crosstables, one way Anova, The Mann Whitney U test and Mean tests based on the responses of the participants with the mean of SPSS 17. This study is expected to show whether monolingual and bilingual students differ in learning modal units, which modal units are more challenging for individuals. Moreover, this study is expected to shed light on the role of the first language transfer on the acquisition of English modal units.