Abstract:
This study was designed to investigate the acquisition of English Wh-interrogatives by secondary school pupils who are Dholuo L1 speakers. The utterances of two groups, identified on the basis of a proficiency tests, were collected and analysed. The hypotheses investigated were drawn from three theoretical domains. These domains were: the influence of First language in the learning of a second language, differences in performance due to differences in proficiency levels, and the influence of language learning tasks on Interlanguage performance.
The data for this study was collected from rural parts of Kenya, where it was thought that only English and Dholuo would be in contact and the learners were only exposed to English in school and classrooms.
Having predicted that learners would transfer the structures with question words in situ from Dholou, and working with a restricting definition of transfer, this study has observed minimal statistical evidence of transfer in the Interlanguage of Dholuo L1 learners. The evidence of transfer has been observed in the lexico-semantic domain where Dholuo speakers have transferred concepts from Dholuo to the Interlanguage. The statistical and error analyses have observed a large amount of data that have revealed the phenomena of double auxiliary and double tense/agreement marking. Theses errors are believed to emanate from the learner's perception of the I constituent. Double auxiliary marking is explained here as a consequence of the learner's perception of the head I of IP occurring in VP therefore motivating the overgeneralisation of do-support in question formation. Double tense/agreement marking is explained as a consequence of the application of both I and V movements (normally mutually exclusive) within one finite clause. (DX 183296)
