Nguyen Mai Linb Tgp chi KHOA HQC & CONG NGHE 133(03)72:31-36
WORD ORDER ERRORS IN VIETNAMESE-SPEAKING EFL LEARNERS' ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES: A PRELIMINARY STUDY
Linh, N.M College of Information and Communication Technology - TNU
SUMMARRY
Every learner who starts leaming a new language makes mistakes or errors. Those errors play an important role in understanding the process of language acquisition and in language teaching.
Error Analysis, a branch of Applied Linguistics, has bloomed since the sixties ofthe 20' century and greatly contributed to language study and teaching. Researchers in the field have classified different categories of errors as well as identified a variety of error sources. The purpose of this study was to initially investigate word order error of English noun phrases resulted from intertingual transfer among Vietnamese students at elementary level and its teaching implications.
A preliminary observation showed that this error occurred at a high frequency in learner's written text and caused by the difference in Viemamese and English noun phrase sfructures. Some types of exercises are recommended to help students to be aware of such difference and train students to overcome that error.
Keywords: Error, Error Analysis, Word Order. Ll transfer, second language acquisilion.
Introduction Errors as a matter of fact
Mistakes or errors seem to be the inseparable part of any learning process. No one could ride a bike without falling once or twice. It is the same with language leaming; a child starts to learn their native language by imitating other people's saying. He makes mistakes, and then gets corrected by adults. By this way, he slowly develops and masters the language.
In the same way, making mistakes or errors may be unavoidable to all second language (L2) leamers in the process of their L2 development. Learners' errors are important in the way that they "ean provide to the researcher evidence of how language is learned or acquired, what strategies or procedures the learner is employing in the discovery ofthe language" [2]
Categories of errors
There have been a number of error categories, among which some generalized classifications could be listed such as the one by [3] and by [1].
Email: nmlinh@iclu edu v,
The former one could be exemplified as follows:
Omission
Morphological: A strange thing happen to me yesterday.
Syntactical; Must say also the names?
Addition
Morphological: The books is here.
Syntactical: The London
Lexical: I stayed there during five years ago.
Selection
Morphological: My friend is the oldest than me.
Syntactical: / want that he comes here.
Ordering
Phono\ogical:Jignisicantfor "significant"
Morphological; get uppingfor getting up Syntactical: He is a dear to me friend Lexical: key car for "car key"
In the latter category, errors are classified into local error ' and global error.
The first one, local error, is defined as the one which does not hinder the understanding for the text such as;
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Nguyen Mat Linh Tap chi KHOA HQC & CONG NGHE 133(03)/2:31 -36 / like play badminton and volleyball
Even though the learner does not use a correct form "playing" as it follows "like" in the example, he still can convey his message.
Global error, in contrast, makes the sentence incomprehensible, for example:
Well, it's a great hurry around
Even if this sentence is put into context, it is hard for the listener/reader to interpret it.
Sources of errors
Identifying sources of errors is as important as identifying errors themselves, for those sources make it possible for researchers and teachers to "take another step toward understanding how the leamer"s cognitive and affective processes relate to the linguistic system and to formulate an integrated understanding of the process of second language acquisition" [1]. In his work, [1]
identified 4 sources of errors, including interlingual transfer, tntralingual transfer, context of learning, and communication strategies.
Interlingual transfer can be said to be common at the early stage of language development when the learner's language competence is limited. Mother tongue is the only source of linguistic materials that the learner can depend on to build up their second language production. Interlingual transfer or Ll transfer is a major source of errors for beginners. A elementary Vietnamese- speaking EFL learner can say "/ very like playing games" instead of "/ like playing games very much" because of a negative transfer from Vietnamese "Tdi rdt thich chai tro chai diin tir. " or "gir! beautiful" instead of "beautifulgirl" which results from the rule that adjectives follow nouns in Vietnamese.
L2 learners reach a higher stage, and that is where intralingual transfer comes.
Intralingual transfer occurs when the learner makes a generalization within target language, which ean be observed in the example 'He musts leave now." As the
learner study the rule of adding - s to tbe verb following a third singular subject in the present simple tense, he generalizes that rule to all kinds of verbs including modal auxiliaries which are an exception.
Tbe language input (from the teacher or materials in classroom settings) set in the context of leaming can also cause learner's errors. This is what [1] called "false concepts"
and [1] termed it in different way "induced errors" [1]. This source of errors could be all of kinds such as misleading explanation from the teacher, incorrect structures or words printed in a textbook, inappropriate context use of a drill, and booklish language.
Communication sfrategies the learner use to overcome some shortage in their linguistic reservoir could be the source of error. For example, some prefabricated pattems could help in an appropriate context or be an error in another.
Other researchers also suggested some other categories of error sources, but those four sources can be said to be widely cited.
Word order as an interlingual error Word order: a universal error
As mentioned previously, at low level, L2 leamers' native language could negatively interfere with their second language acquisition. Therefore, word order errors can be widely found in English leamers of all native languages. The variations in word order of different languages influence on all language skills.
As a passive skill, the reading process distinguishes word-recognition and word- integration [4]. In word-recognition, words are decoded in terms of their graphical forms and mapped to tbe sound forms.
Following word-recognition is word- integration in which readers integrate words into phrases, clauses. This process may be influenced by different syntactic structures of different languages. In a study of Arabic literacy, [6] postulated.
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Nguyen Mai Linh Tgp chi KHOA HOC & CONG NGHE 133(03)/2:31-36
"Arabic word-integration or sentence-parsing procedures utilize a set of right-branching word-integration or sentence-parsing processes in which the head of a phrase (e.g.
the noun in a noun phrase or the verb in a verb phrase) guides and consfrains how subsequent words (such as modifiers or complements) are attached or integrated into the preposition, noun, and verb phrase structures." (p. 112)
This process of word-integration is different from such languages as Japanese and Korean but similar to English, which makes English leamers of these languages perform differently at the word-integration level [4].
In a comparative study of native Arabic- and Japanese-speaking leamers of English as a second language in terms of word-integration, [5] found out Arabic-speaking leamers perform better than Japanese-speaking learners. In the word integration experiment ofthe study, Arabic learners had better results in terms of word interpretation accuracy which was shown by better comprehension scores. [5] suggested that the overlapping in terms of word integration at phrase and clause level of word integration between Arabic and English languages may explain such difference in the performance of Arabic and Japanese L2 leamers.
The similarity and difference in phrase structures between Ll and, L2 do influence the quality of L2 reading, and its high correlated skill, writing, as well as other skills. Concerning complex nominal compounds, [9] conducted a study on Spanish speaking English learners' interpretation of complex noun phrases derived from the differences in English and Spanish that
"English can simply juxtapose different words by their semantic relationship, as in blood urea nitrogen concentrations. However, Spanish is not a synthetic language and needs connectors to join the different elements of a phrase [...]" (p. 39). Due to such difference, Spanish-speaking learners find it difficult to identify the headword of a complex noun
phrase. Similar to Spanish, [10] stated that French uses prepositions or relative clauses instead of long complex noun phrases. For example, water vapor is vapeur d'eau in French
Word order error among Vietnamese- speaking EFL learners
Vietnamese noun phrases are also different from those in English; premodifiers of noun phrases in English are moved to postmodification positions in Vietnamese. For example, water vapor is equivalent to hai nude in Vietnamese, in which hai means vapor, and nir&c means water, or an interesting book becomes cudn sdch (book) hay (interesting) in Vietnamese. This syntactic difference may slow down or interfere with Vietnamese-speaking EFL leamers' process of L2 acquisition. Especially with long complex nominal phrases, the head word must be first identified to be able to integrate with other modifiers. While Vietnamese speakers have formed the routine of recognizing the first word of a noun string as the headword which guides the subsequent words, this routine needs to be adjusted when they read in English, the language of which the headword of a noun phrase is often not at the initial position.
In a preliminary investigation of students' difficulties in dealing with complex noun phrases, a group of long nominal phrases have been provided for a number of 3"^ year students at College of Information and Communication Technology, Thai Nguyen University who were taking their ESP course to franslate. Word order error occurs at a high frequency in their translated text.
It can be seen that word order is the most frequently occurring error, which is resulted from the interference of Vietnamese stmctures into English counterparts. Things become more serious when this error occurs not only in long complex nominal phrases but also in numerous of elementary Vietnamese- speaking:-EFL leamers' compositions. Some examples can be taken as follows (original sentences written by students);
33
Nguyen Mai Linh Tap chi KHOA HQC & CONG NGHE 133(03)/2'31-36 / have a memory unforgettable
A long time ago, I had a adventure very memorable
1 have hair back
The film says about the boy Harry and his friends at school magic
It is a story of love romantic
A handsome guy, smart, talented love girl stupid
Vector was robbed at gun magic on Gru's hands.
My brother is student high school Ordering seems to be a common interlingual error among Vietnamese-speaking EFL leamers whose language competence is still limited because of negative Ll fransfer, and scaffolding students to overcome this difficulty is teachers' job.
Teaching implication
If it is a high-frequency error, teachers should give some emphasis on it. Correction is one way to deal with the error, but in a more effective approach, students should be aware of such difference and trained to handle it.
This study recommended some activities to familiarize students with presence of the different sfructures in the two languages and train them to work on it.
Task I Text Search
The student could be provided with a text and asked to underiine, circle or list all noun phrases they find in the text. The student can discuss and compare with other students' responses or with the teacher's one. The purpose of this exercise" is to make students notice or raise students' awareness of such structures in English. Such awareness makes this category of lexical item, noun phrase word order, become salient the next time students encounter them [8].
This type of task could be equivalent to the most basic level in [7]'s classification of vocabulary exercise and could be labeled as selective attention type according to [ll]'s topology of text-based vocabulary exercises.
The following is an example.
Do you like housework? No? Then this new robot vacuum cleaner is the machine for you.
It can clean your living room automatically. It has a computer which tells it to go around objects such as chairs and table legs as it cleans your floor. And if a person - or your pet dog or cat - comes to close, it stops automatically. The Bryson D838 Robot
Vacuum Cleaner comes with electric batteries, and costs £1,800.
Original texts
Table 1. ESP students' word order errors Translated texts
High-energy ultraviolet light wave Nang lupng cao dnh sdng cue tim Wave reflection
Dieu khien tir xa Bp thu sdng vd tuyln Song mang tan so cao NSng lupng sdng vo tuyen Tin hieu thoai tuong ty Vdn toe Ian truyin song Truyen ddn tuong tu Vacuum diode Dia chi IP dich Giao thuc chuydn mach kenh Tin hi^u ddu vao dieu bien Sy khiic xa song Tin hieu dieu che Tin hieu thdng tin tin s6 thdp
sdng phan xa Confrol remote Receiver television Carrier high frequency Energy radio wave Voice analog signal Velocity propagate Transmission analog Chdn khdng di dt Address IP purpose Protocol circuit switching AM signal input Refraction wave Modulate signal
Low information frequency wave
Corrected translation Sdng anh sdng cyc tim nSng lupng cao
Su phan xa sdng Remote confrol Television receiver High frequency carrier Radio wave energy Analog voice signal Propagation velocity Analog transmission Di dt chan khong Target IP address Circuit switching protocol AM input signal Wave refraction Signal modulation Low frequency information signal
Nguyen Mai Linh Tgp chi KHOA HOC & CONG NGHE 133(03)/2:3! - 3 6
Follow - u p activity 1: T h o s e underlined noun phrases can then classified into different categories of structures, noun + noun or adjective + noun.
Follow-up activity 2: after that, students can be asked to translate t h o s e phrases into Vietnamese so that they ean have a better awareness of those differences.
Task 2 C h o o s e the correct explanations, /. Brick house
a. house made of brick b. brick for m a k i n g house 2. House brick a. house m a d e of brick b. brick for making house
This task focuses on the order o f t h e word in the combination. T b e order changes could m a k e the meaning o f t h e whole combination change. This task gets students familiar with indentifying the role of bead nouns and modifiers regarding t o the combination meaning.
Task 3 Use a sentence to interpret the following phrases;
A handsome guy (a guy is handsome) Table legs (some legs belong to a table) Airport food (Food can be bought at an airport)
Electric batteries (Batteries are powered by electricity)
Task 4. Form the correct phrases A book IS interesting (an interesting book) A student is hard w o r k i n g and smart (a smart and hardworking student)
A table is made o f w o o d (a wooden table) A stick is for walking ( a -walking stick) This task is the simple exercise at production level. This may help student not only with interpreting the noun phrases but also producing them in at a low level.
In conclusion, teachers can d e v e l o p different kinds of exercises to help their students to avoid word order error, as well as other types of errors that can be observed during their teaching.
R E F E R E N C E S
[I]. Brovm, H.D., (2000), Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (4"" edition). NY: Pearson [2]. Corder, S P., (1967). "The significance of learners' errors" IRAL, 5(4),pp.l61-170 [3]. Corder, S. P., (1973) Introducing Applied Linguistics. Middlesex: Penguin
[4]. Fender, M. (2001). "A Review of Ll and L2/ESL Word Integration Skills and the Nature of L2/ESL Word Integration Development Involved in Lower-Level Text Processing", Language Learning. 51(2), 3i9-396.
[5]. Fender, M. (2003). "English word recognition and word integration skills of native Arabic- and Japanese-speaking leamers of English as a second language". Applied Psycholinguislics. 24(02), 289- 315.
[6]. Fender, M. (2008), "Arabic literacy development and cross-linguistic effects in subsequent L2 literacy development". In A. M. Z, Keiko Koda (Ed.), Learning lo read across languages: cross-linguisllc relationships in first- and second-language literacy development (pp 101 - 124). New York, NY: Routledge.
[7]. Gass, S.M. (1988). "Second language vocabulary acquisition". Annual Review of AppliedLingusltic, 9, 92-106,
[8]. Nation, I. S. P (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press
[9]. Pastor, L. C. (2008). "English complex noun phrase interpretation by Spanish leamers". RESLA, 21, 27-44.
[10]. Salager-Meyer, F, (1984). "Compound nominal phrases in scientific-technical literature:
proportion and rationale". In A. K. Pugh & J. M Ulijin (Eds.), Reading for professional purposes ~ studies and practices in native and foreign languages (^p. 138-149). London: Heinemann.
[ I I ] . Wesche, M. B., & Paribakht, T. S (2000).
"Reading-Based Exercises in Second Language Vocabulary Leaming: An Introspective Study".
The Modern Language Journal. 84(2), 196-213
Nguyin Mai Linh Tap chi KHOA HQC & CONG N G H ? l33(03)/2: 3 1 - 3 6
TOM TAT
NGHIEN c u t ! SO Bp VE LOI SAI TRAT TU* TU" TRONG CUM DANH TU"
TIENG ANH CUA SINH VIEN TRlTOfNG DAI HOC CONG NGHE THONG TIN VA TRUYEN THONG, DAI HQC THAI NGUYEN
Nguyin Mai Linh ' Truang Dai hoc Cong nghe Ihong tin vd Truyin thdng - DH Thdi Nguyen
Muc dich ciia nghien ciiu ndy la dm hieu budc ddu ve loi trat ty tir, mdt ldi gay ra bdi su anh hudng cita cau tnic tieng Viet sang cau tnic tieng Anh, frong cdc cum danh tu tieng Anh ma sinh vien Viet Nam hay mic phai. Quan sat so bp cho thdy day Id mpt ldi rdt phd bien ma nhftng ngudi hoc tieng Anh d trinh dp so cap mac phdi Cudi cung, mpt sd dang bdi tdp dupc dua ra nhdm giilp sinh vien nhan thiJc dupc sy khac biet trong cdu tnic ciia hai ngdn ngii va luyfin tdp nhdm tranh mde lai cdc ldi do.
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