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THE COMPREHENSION OF THREE COMPLEX ENGLISH STRUCTURES BY DUTCH LEARNERS 1
Author(s) -
Bongaerts Theo
Publication year - 1983
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.1467-1770.1983.tb00533.x
Subject(s) - psychology , linguistics , hebrew , comprehension , second language acquisition , similarity (geometry) , arabic , mathematics education , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy , image (mathematics)
This study investigated the comprehension of three complex English structures by Dutch learners at different levels of proficiency. The research was inspired by Carol Chomsky's investigations (1969, 1972) of English‐speaking children's acquisition of complex English structures and by studies by d'Anglejan and Tucker (1975) and Cooper, Olshtain, Tucker, and Waterbury (1979) of the acquisition of such structures by adult learners with different LI backgrounds and at different levels of proficiency. For the present study, the research instruments developed by d'Anglejan and Tucker and used by Cooper et al. were adopted, and in part, adopted. The responses of the Dutch learners were in many ways similar to those of the French Canadians studied by d'Anglejan and Tucker and the Egyptians and Israelis in Cooper et al.'s study, but there was also an important difference: The Dutch learners had fewer problems with the easy to see structure. It is argued that this difference can be accounted for by differences in LI learning experiences. Dutch learners of English have already been confronted with the problem of surface structure similarity between eager to see and easy to see sentences in the course of learning their LI, whereas French‐, Arabic‐, and Hebrew‐speaking learners have not.