A CHILD ENGLISH L2 DEVELOPMENT OF PLURALITY

Abstract

This study examines the development of English plurality of a child learner learning English as a second language, which focuses on plural marking in written English. The data was in the form of written language produced by IA, a younger child learner learning English as L2 in an instructional context, and was collected at ten points in time during the period of five months. Based on the data, a distributional analysis of the participant was carried out, and then the findings were analysed by using the implicational scaling according to the emergence criterion to determine the acquisition points of the target structures. The results of the distributional analysis indicate that plural -s marking emerged in IA since Time 7 of the data collection, and it has since been used productively by the subject in the subsequent points of time. The finding of this longitudinal study suggests that the development of plural marking appears to follow PT’s predictions. Moreover, the result of this research reveals that the prediction of PT are followed in written production of English L2, which indicates PT’s capacity to account for morphological acquisition in written language production.

Keywords: English as L2, Development, Plurality, Emergence