Transfer in Second Language Acquisition - Turkish Students speaking English

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 1,8, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: This study deals with the issue of language transfer. Thus, we compared the performance of English by two different groups. 20 students participated in the study, 10 live in Germany and 10 in Turkey. All 20 are L1 speakers of Turkish. The students from Turkey are L2 speakers of English. The other 10 students are L2 speakers of German with English as their L3. The participants translated sentences from Turkish into English. We examined whether the participants from Germany outperformed students from Turkey. If language transfer took place students from Germany should indeed perform better. Our assumption is based on their knowledge of German, which is similar to English in some aspects. Performance relating to word order, auxiliaries and negations were appraised. However, the results show that our assumption cannot be affirmed. Students from Turkey were as good as or even better than the students from Germany in all three categories. Nevertheless, we made observations supporting the idea of language transfer. For instance, students from Germany were definitely better in formulating relative clauses, which do not occur in Turkish. In summary, there are no conclusive results to confirm the existence of language transfer.