Morphosyntactic Issues in Second Language Acquisition

This volume examines different aspects of morphosyntactic development of bilingual language learners/users such as language transfer, syntactic processing, morphology and the pragmatics of language among others. The book explores the interface between research findings and pedagogy of foreign language teaching. Contents Contributors Preface Part 1: Studies on ESL/EFL Morphosyntactic Development 1. Focus Constructions and Language Transfer 2. Argument Realisation and Information Packaging in Tough- Movement Constructions: A Learner-Corpus-Based Investigation 3. L1 Syntactic Preferences of Polish Adolescents in Bilingual and Monolingual Education Programmes 4. MOGUL and Crosslinguistic Influence 5. Syntactic Processing in Multilingual Performance (A Case Study) 6. The Morphology -me in Modern Greek as L2: How German and Russian L2 Learners Interpret Verbal Constructions 7. Unaccusativity Marks 8. To Move or Not to Move: Acquisition of L2 English Syntactic Movement Parameter 9. Last to Acquire: On the Relation of Concession in Interpreting 10. Pragmatic (In)Competence in EFL Writing Part 2: Pedagogical Grammar in Promoting Acquisition of L2 Morphosyntax 11. The Role of Explicit Rule Presentation in Teaching English Articles to Polish Learners 12. The Effect of Corrective Feedback on the Acquisition of the English Third-Person -s Ending 13. The Acquisition of German Syntax by Polish Learners in Classroom Conditions 14. Introducing Language Interface in Pedagogical Grammar 15. Towards Reflecting the Dynamic Nature of Grammar in Foreign Language Instruction: Expectations and Current Pedagogic Practice

The volume consists of articles on issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such has Polish, Greek and Turkish. It highlights areas which may be expected to be especially transfer-prone at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. The articles in the first part report empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language learners. The second part elaborates on pedagogical issues concerning the acquisition of difficult grammatical features such as the English article system or the ‘s’ ending in the third person singular. It also comments more generally on the way pedagogic grammar functions in the learning of the L2.

Presents a selection of second language acquisition studies at the level of morphosyntax. This work looks at different aspects of morphosyntactic development of bilingual language learners/users such as language transfer, syntactic processing, morphology and the pragmatics of language, among others