Word Frequencies in Finnish and Finland-Swedish Learner Language.

A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written by Finnish-speakers would show lower frequencies in the use of English articles and of prepositions where simple one-to-one correspondences are difficult to establish. The frequencies of these words were expected to rise somewhat in intermediate essays and to rise to almost native-speaker level in the good essays. Because Finland-Swedish is grammatically closer to English, the figures for Finland-Swedish learners were expected to be higher than those of the Finns at the lower levels, but the figures for the best essays were not expected to differ very much. One hundred fifty essays on three levels of proficiency written by Finnish-speaking and the same number written by Swedish-speaking students were chosen to test the hypothesis. The data supported that hypothesis. It is concluded that the pattern of learning articles and prepositions in English where there are no easily established Finnish equivalents represents an avoidance by the students of linguistic features that are absent in the first language and perhaps considered redundant by the learner at early stages. The process should be considered a lack of transfer rather than indirect negative transfer of knowledge from the first language to the second. (MSE) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY zeik EN kv; Hdkan Ringbom CO .1) TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)." O U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office or Educattonat Research and Oro:No:Nem/al EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER IERICI kThts document has been reproduced as ,ece.ed trom the person or Organrzatron orahnaung C Mtn*, changes hatte been made to tmprove reproduction Quaid, 1%4'. °ants of wew or 00m:0ln Stated on this document do not necessarily rePhasent &hotel OERI posthon or pottcy U.1 WORD FREQUENCIES IN FINNISH AND FINLANDSWEDISH LEARNER LANGUAGE Vocabulary learning starts with the learning of high-frequency words, but in order to understand these high-frequency words it is essential to have a knowledge of the functions of the basic grammatical categories to which these words belong. If the learner can rely on at least rough crosslinguistic correspondences between the basic grammatical categories, it will be relatively easy for him to establish simplified equivalences between individual lexical items. When such equivalences can be established for high-frequency words this will help the learnerconsiderably in his learning, whereas, for instance, low-frequency loanwords, formally similar to equivalent L I-words obviously are of much less help. A workable reference frame in the LI is especially important for the early stages of learning (cf. Ringbom 1985). Grammatical categories not found in the learner's LI pose especially great learning problems. In English. the use of the articles has been mentioned by several error analysts as a particularly difficult area to learn for learners whose L 1 does not have articles. Thus Oiler & Redding found that there was a clear difference between two groups of learners: "GI (students whose native languages havc formal equivalents) performed better on the test of article usage than G2 (students whose native language did not have equivalents....) The differences... were statistically significant" (197I:90 f.). The learning problems for Czech learners was mentioned by Dulkova (1969), and for FinniA learners there are several invesr, tigations arriving at the same result (Granfors & Palmberg (1976), Hertanen (1978), Ringbom (1978a), Sajavaara (1983), and Ekman-Laine 0(1984)). gaff COPY AVAILAKE 2