著者

江口 朗子 杉浦 正利

出版者

The Japan Society of English Language Education

雑誌

全国英語教育学会紀要 (ISSN:13448560)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.26, pp.157-172, 2015-03-31 (Released:2017-04-20)

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The main purpose of this study is to examine a refined method of analysis to elucidate the process of grammatical morpheme acquisition. For decades, the majority of "morpheme order studies" have applied the accuracy-based group score method (GSM) following Dulay and Burt (1973), despite its two potential methodological weaknesses: ignoring oversuppliance and neglecting L2 proficiency. However, the two potential weaknesses have not been empirically tested to a sufficient extent. Therefore, it is still unclear whether the GSM explains the morpheme acquisition process for EFL learners. Through a corpus-based investigation of verbal morphemes in 60 essays written by Japanese university students, two major results were obtained. First, the accuracy orders in general did not change regardless of whether oversuppliance was included. Second, the accuracy orders, however, differed considerably when taking both oversuppliance and L2 proficiency into account. Additionally, it was found that this was especially due to the frequent overuse of the third person -s by high proficiency learners, whose production was significantly more complex than lower proficiency learners. The findings suggest that syntactic complexity could affect accuracy development. Therefore, not only accuracy but also complexity should be taken into consideration in discussion of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes.