THE EFFECT OF L1 IN COMPREHENSION AND DESCRIPTION OF MOTION EVENT IN ENGLISH BY TURKISH PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS OF ENGLISH


Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Uludağ Üniversitesi, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2017

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: SEYİT DENİZ YILMAZ

Danışman: DERYA YILMAZ

Özet:

In the present study, it was aimed to look for the bidirectional crosslinguistic effect between L1 Turkish (verb-framed) and L2 English (satellite-framed) in the descriptions of motion events by Turkish pre-service teachers of English as a different perspective from the previous studies focusing on only language learners rather than teachers. Three types of motion events were used as stimuli since similarities or typological differences were found to be more salient in the descriptions of these motions: boundary-crossing motion events, motions with manner climbing, and motions with short/long-trajectories. In each category, there are two sub-types of motion: one for which same and one for which different conceptualization patterns can be used in Turkish and English. Narratives were elicited from Turkish pre-service teachers of English in spoken Turkish, spoken English, and written English, and compared with each other through quantitative and qualitative analysis by analyzing verb and adverbial devices in detail. Differently from previous studies, the frequent patterns used by Turkish participants were judged by the same Turkish pre-service teachers, and English native speakers by means of a survey. Therefore, each group's construal of the different conceptualization patterns was revealed rather than only descriptions. The results showed that Turkish pre-service teachers were somewhat in a transitional level to acquire the expected, natural English satellite-framed patterns. They frequently used these patterns in their L2 narratives of the motions for which different conceptualization patterns are used in each language. However, the effect of Turkish was to some extent seen in the English data because some participants maintained verb-framed patterns. This effect was slightly more salient in spoken English compared with written English. Additionally, they created some idiosyncratic and converged patterns in both Turkish and English due to the bidirectional cross-linguistic effect. As for the motions which can be described within similar conceptualization patterns in both languages, they almost always showed the expected satellite-framed patterns in English narrations. With respect to the survey results, it was found out that Turkish group was similarly in a transitional process because they were contended with natural English patterns, though not as confident as English native speakers. However, for the unnatural verb-framed, idiosyncratic or Turkish-like patterns, Turkish group showed inconsistency in their judgements while English group was mostly dissatisfied with them. Lastly, it was shown that native English speaker group was not totally dissatisfied with some of these unnatural patterns even though they do not use them frequently.