The Accessibility of Transfer in the Acquisition of Wh And Yes/No Questions by Albanian Secondary School Learners in Struga

The Accessibility of Transfer in the Acquisition of Wh And Yes/No Questions by Albanian Secondary School Learners in Struga

NUSHI, Vlera

Key words:Contrastive Analyses, interlanguage, language transfer, positive negative transfer, ABSTRACT As an English teacher with twelve years teaching experience in Macedonia, I have very often noticed that most of my students have difficulties in asking questions in English especially WH questions. Their most common errors are failure to include an obligatory auxiliary or if they do include the auxiliary, they fail to invert it before the subject. The focus of this study is one parameter of universal grammar, syntactic movement, the inversion of auxiliary and the subject, which I believe is important because it would shed light into Albanian secondary school intermediate learners ‘strategies in coping with parametric differences between L1 and L2. This study also points out the possible differences in terms of syntactic movement parameter in the formation of WH and Yes/ No questions. Assessing the contrastive analysis hypothesis as an approach about SLA it could be said that these kinds of difficulties that Albanian intermediate secondary school students have may provide some account of transfer. Some contrasts between languages are inappropriate and they lead to negative transfer where as some of them are appropriate and lead to positive transfer.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1985