Reassembling Formal Features in Articles by L1 Persian Learners of L2 English

Abstract

There has been considerable debate over what the sources of morphological variation in second language <br />acquisition are. From among various hypotheses put forth on the topic, the feature reassembly hypothesis <br />(Lardiere, 2005) assumes that it is the reconfiguration of features in the L2 which causes variation between <br />the performance of natives and non-natives. Acknowledged as one of the most difficult elements of English <br />grammar to be acquired by learners, the article system was the focus of the present study which aimed at <br />attending to the acquisition of that system by Persian learners. This descriptive piece of research focused on <br />how the article system functions in English and Persian, the similarities found across the two languages and <br />the possible sources of difficulty for Persian learners in using English articles as related to their L1. The <br />participants included Persian learners at three levels of grammatical knowledge. A group of English native <br />speakers also took part in the study. A grammaticality judgment test and a translation test were conducted to <br />collect data. Comparisons were made among the four groups, using ANOVAs. Based on the results, it is <br />argued that the observed pattern of article use among Persian speaking learners can be best accounted for by <br />the feature reassembly hypothesis.