Production of questions in English language by National-Type Chinese Primary School students / Wong Ai Li

Wong , Ai Li (2023) Production of questions in English language by National-Type Chinese Primary School students / Wong Ai Li. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Students from different language backgrounds may face distinct difficulties when acquiring English as a second language and this may present a challenge in the teaching and learning of English in multilingual Malaysia. Learning about potential differences between learner groups can inform teaching practice of English language teachers, particularly in relation to challenging language structures such as questions. Therefore, the current study aims to examine production of English questions by a group of National-type Chinese primary school students, categorized as either Dominant Speakers of English or Dominant Speakers of Mandarin. Categorisation of the participants was conducted via self-report, Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) questionnaire by Birdsong, Gertken, and Amengual (2014), and interview sessions with randomly selected guardians. The researcher obtained data from 56 Year-Four students to examine production of English questions via three language elicitation tasks: a simulation task, sentence transformation task and translation task. The findings revealed major difficulties faced by both groups of participants were tenses errors, incorrect verb phrase structures, and erroneous use of some wh-words. In addition, Mandarin dominant language students made visibly more omission, inversion and sentence structure errors in contrast to English dominant language. In conclusion, learners from different backgrounds may have different learning needs, which could be due to the transfer of structural patterns from their first language.

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