The Role of Innate Knowledge in First and Second Language Acquisition - by Hasanbey Ellidokuzoglu - Education - http://maxpages.com/thena/Turkish

VIII. WANNA AND TURKISH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

L2 Data concerning the wanna contraction is particularly valuable as Turkish learners learning English in an EFL context are exposed to minimum amount of wanna sentences. This is basically because of the scarcity of authentic input: it is hard to find instances of wanna in bookish EFL input. So if these learner are successful in a grammaticality judgement (GJ) task with wanna statements, this can hardly be attributed to their repeated exposure to such sentences but to their ever-active UG-based knowledge.

For this purpose, a GJ task is designed in which there are six cases of wanna and four gonna contraction (see APPENDIX). The gonna sentences have nothing to do with UG constraints: they are included as distractors so that the subjects (Ss) cannot easily discover the underlying rule using their conscious processing. Unlike other typical written GJ tasks, a the target sentences are also recorded on a tape because it is basically during listening that their intuition will be more evident. The wanna and gonna sentences are presented in a context of dialogue to remove any extraneous factors due to difficulty in understanding. For the same reason grammatical wanna sentences are deliberately made longer than the ungrammatical ones. To remove the frequency of exposure factor, infrequent structures are used in grammatical wanna sentences like inversion, future tense, third person pronoun (see items 1 and 4). Only the sentence having the wanna and gonna contraction are recorded on the tape by a native speaker. Each sentence is read twice: first in noncontracted form (want to and going to) and then with wanna and gonna. During the design phase native speakers are asked to confirm the validity of the dialogues.

The Ss (30 in number) are university-level Turkish learners of English, who have been learning English for the last six years. Their age span is between 18-20 and they started to learn English (in an extensive sense) during Lycee prep, roughly corresponding to the critical period which is assumed to be the end of active UG.

The test is administered in a laboratory context. Having a sense of the dialogue, Ss are told to listen to the target sentences each of which is read twice. They are also told to close their eyes for better concentration and indicate when the second reading (with the contracted form) sounds awkward. The number of Ss judging each sentence awkward are as follows:

ITEM NO------------>1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9--1O

NUMBER OF
SUBJECTS--------->6--4--13--5--4--9--8--2--5--11

Items 3, 8, 10 include ungrammatical wanna contractions and item 7 the ungrammatical gonna. Of the three target items the two--items 3 and 10-- are scored highest in terms of ungrammaticality, even higher than item 7 where gonna sounds real awkward. Item 2, however, could not be detected as ungrammatical by a great majority of the subjects: it is the lowest on the scale of ungrammaticality. When Ss are asked at the end of the test they could not state the real rule why wanna is not possible and some of them stated false rules related to the negativity or phonological aspects of the sentences.

9. Conclusion

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