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Title:
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Acquisition of the English Article System by Francophone Students: The case of Burkina Faso
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Author:
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Moses Kambou
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, Department of Educational Psychology
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Degree Date:
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1997
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Applied Linguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Eyamba Bokamba
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Abstract:
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In the literature on second and foreign language acquisition, few studies have been reported on the acquisition of English as a third language (L3) and almost nothing with speakers of African languages (L1) and French (L2) as the previously acquired languages.
This study discusses the results of a cross-sectional study, undertaken in 1996, which reexamined the phenomenon of transfer in the acquisition of English as a foreign language (L3) by francophone English major college students in Burkina Faso (West Africa). The theoretical framework on which this research is based is the semantic model developed by Huebner (1983), known as the "semantic wheel for noun phrase reference". The reserach focused on the acquisition of the English article system. The study involved 177 volunteer undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Ouagadougou with at least seven years of English instruction. A cloze test of 107 items as well as an error identification and correction tasks with 70 items of which 33 were incorrectly used served as data collection instruments. Demographic information was also collected using a 16-item questionnaire.
The overall rate of accuracy with regard to the correct use of the three articles studied here is above average: cloze test (71%), error identification (75%), and error correction (61%). The results also show thar (a) learners had difficulties with the article usage in all four semantic categories: generic, referential definite, referential indefinite, and non-referential contexts; (b) correlation between academic level and performance depended on task type; (c) learners associated the zero article with the [+HK] feature in [-SR +HK] contexts and the indefinite article with the [+SR] feature in [+SR -HK] contexts; (d) learners exhibited interlingual (L1 and L2)as well as intralingual transfer.
The study discusses the implications of these results on the concept of referentiality, and questions the generalizability of Huebner's (1983) model to all languages. The study provides not only data, but also evidence of levels of difficulty, constraints and sources of transfer in L3 acquisition. Suggestions concerning directions for future research are made and especially that of extending the study to cover the determiner system.
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