Premium
LEARNER INTUITIONS OF GRAMMATICALLY
Author(s) -
Schachter Jacquelyn,
Tyson Adele F.,
Diffley Frank J.
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1976.tb00260.x
Subject(s) - grammaticality , psychology , sentence , set (abstract data type) , linguistic competence , competence (human resources) , linguistics , language acquisition , grammar , natural language processing , computer science , mathematics education , social psychology , programming language , philosophy
In order to characterize learner transitional competence adequately and to identify particular learning strategies of students learning a second language, both the actual performance of the learners and their intuitions about the target language must be taken into consideration. Grammaticality judgments by adult target language learners can be a valid means of obtaining the necessary intuitional data. We developed a method of eliciting intuitions of grammaticality and used this method in a pilot project involving 100 ESL students from the following language groups: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Spanish. The subjects were presented with a set of sentences some of which were well‐formed, some of which were malformed in specific ways—and were asked to make a judgment about each sentence. The use of intuitional data forces the researcher to view the learner in a new light. The results of the pilot indicate that the elicitation of intuitional data is revealing and must be pursued.