Browsing by Author "Mushi, Emmanuel Paul"

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    Acquisition of the english determiner phrase by english foreign language learners
    (University of Dar es salaam, 2012) Mushi, Emmanuel Paul
    The purpose of this study was to examine the acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) among English Foreign Learners (EFL), specifically to deduce the nature of Foreign Learner’s knowledge of the English DP and to discover possible order in the process of acquisition of English determiner phrase. Respondents in this study were Form Six students learning English as Foreign Language. To get the data for the study, the students were engaged in a supervised classroom test involving grammaticality judgment and re-ordering of given DP’s elements. It was hypothesized in this study that the foreign learners of English have cognition or knowledge of the grammar of the DP and that there is a definite route which they follow in acquiring the DP elements. These hypotheses were motivated by the fact that other researches in the areas of first and second language acquisition have discovered orders of acquisition of some other grammatical elements and structures (Brown 1973; Dulay and Burt 1973 & 1974; Kwon, 2005).The findings of this study have shown that EFL learners have a strong knowledge of headedness of DP, and that the order of acquisition is Noun >Determiner >Adjective. Further, it has been discovered that learners find it difficult to discover accepted order of a specified group or type of words within a specified grammatical category; for example, order or so called determiners or adjectives within their domain in the DP.