A Comparative Study of the Impact of First Language Literacy on Acquisition of English Phrases among Illiterate, Low-Literate and Literate Adult Learners in Iran

Abstract

The process of foreign language syntactic development regarding learners’ L1 literacy level is different among adult learners. Many studies have shown that illiterate and low-literate learners follow the same path in the L2 morphosyntax development despite their L1 literacy level. However, little research has been carried out to focus on differences in the new language literacy development among learners with varying first language proficiency. Therefore, the current study was carried out to investigate the differences in learning English adjectival and prepositional phrases among three Kurdish adult groups of literate, low-literate, and illiterate learners in one term. Additionally, it probed the major difficulties they faced through the English phrase acquisition process. Mixed methods were used for data collection including observations of the classes supplemented by audio recording and English phrase tests. Through the application of three tests of recognition, matching, and multiple-choice type, the outcome knowledge of adjectival and prepositional phrases was assessed and compared among groups. The obtained data were analyzed through the Kruskal-Wallis test. Some tangible results were detected from tests that did not ascribe the differences in learning English absolutely to background schooling and literacy. In fact, they showed that there were significant differences among groups in matching and multiple-choice type post-tests, while there were no considerable differences in recognition-type post-test. Furthermore, results also revealed that illiterate and low-literate learners encountered further complicated difficulties and made an unusual combination of pronunciation and grammatical errors in their production.