An investigation into the acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by young Sindhi high school ESL learners

AbstractThe present study aims to explore the acquisition order of eight English grammatical inflectional morphemes, i.e., plural –s, possessive -s’, third person singular, present tense-s, past tense-ed, present participle-ing, past participle-en, comparative-er, and superlative-est by young Sindhi ESL (English as second language learners) learners at the high school. The study aimed to test the hypothesis that the high school English learners do not follow the universal order of grammatical morphemes and to investigate the effect of linguistic interference of L1 (Sindhi) in the acquisition order of English grammatical morphemes. The primary instrument used for data collection in this study was written essays. The time gap between first and second samplings was around three months. A mixed methods research design was utilized. The study used an exploratory-descriptive-qualitative methods coupled with a quantitative as per the objectives of the study corresponding to the research questions. A convenience sampling technique was employed to select participants from 10th Grade level. Specifically, the data was analyzed using the Dulay and Burt (1974) scoring method. The statistical tests were utilized to test the null hypothesis. The data confirmed that they indeed do not follow the universal order of grammatical morphemes. There exists the effect of linguistic inference of L1 in the acquisition order English grammatical morphemes. Finally, the finding is not in line with the sequence as determined by Dulay and Burt (1974), and Brown (1973).