DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2019.973
title: The acquisition of English control and raising constructions by Thai learners

description: This study aimed to investigate Thai EFL learners’ knowledge of English control and raising. L1 Thai is similar to English in terms of control; Thai and English have infinitive markers and PRO in association with infinitival clauses are present. Thai is different from English in respect of promise, which take finite clauses in Thai and infinitivals in English. In addition, Thai does not exhibit subject-to-subject raising, unlike English. Our hypotheses were based on L1/L2 similarities, access to UG, and previous studies. We hypothesized, based on evidence from Witoon’s (2012) Thai participants’ moderately accurate performance on (Object Experiencer) psych-verbs, that if Thai learners have access to UG, their performance on raising would be above chance, and low-high English proficiency would affect accuracy rates. In terms of control, based on previous studies, e.g. Yoshimura et al. (2016), Thai learners’ performance on English control would be more accurate than raising. Within control, it was expected that Thai learners’ performance on object control would be more accurate than subject control, similar to Yoshimura et al.’s (2016) findings with Japanese EFL learners.Two tasks were employed, i.e. Grammaticality Judgment (GJ)/Comprehension and Sentence Judgment. In GJ/Comprehension, there were 24 target tokens (8 per structure) with multiple choice questions, checking participants’ knowledge of controllers of subjects, objects, and matrix subjects of raised seem/appear predicates. In Sentence Judgment, 12 sentences of other raised, unraised, and control sentences, requiring participants to make judgments on grammaticality, were employed to confirm results from GJ/Comprehension. One hundred and forty Thai EFL students, attending an all-boy missionary school and a public university in Bangkok, participated. Three proficiency levels, i.e. Lower Intermediate (25), Intermediate (93), and Advanced (22), were established by the Macmillan English Placement Test. Ten native English speakers served as controlled participants. Hypothesis 1 was confirmed by the Intermediate and the Advanced groups’ data (51%, 73% accuracy); the Lower Intermediate group performed below chance (21%), suggesting the role of proficiency on raising. Results from ANOVA and Post-Hoc analyses indicate significant differences among groups, confirming effects of low-high proficiency on raising. Results from Sentence Judgment confirmed the difficulty of raising, while unraised seem/appear was easier. Hypothesis 2 was confirmed from control and raising comparisons; English control was considerably more accurate than raising, irrespective of levels of proficiency (91-100% accuracy). Effects of sentence type and interaction effects between sentence type and proficiency (by means of ANOVAs) were consistent with the ceiling performance on control and development pattern of raising. In respect of subject and object control comparisons, no significant difference was found. Sentence Judgment results largely confirmed the GJ/comprehension data. The native English speaking data of control and raising were on target. The study’s findings support the role of L1 transfer (commonality of PRO and infinitive markers) and UG in L2 acquisition. In terms of subject controls with object interveners (representing linking between PRO and arguments) and raising (representing A-movement), which are not available in the L1, L2 learners can access linking between PRO and arguments more easily than A-movement. Evidently, accessibility to UG is restricted by marked and specific properties of L2 structures, such as English raising over an experiencer. Given the difficulty of raising found in this study, we recommend that explicit teaching of unraised, raised seem/appear with and without PP interveners be integrated into EFL lessons to enhance accuracy. Also, EFL teachers may provide authentic input by means of English corpora to ensure ample exposure.