Third Language Acquisition

Turkish-German Bilingual Students' Acquisition of English Word Order in a German Educational Setting investigates the syntactic influences of Turkish and German on the acquisition of English word order in a German educational setting. It broadly describes multilingualism in Germany, especially of Turkish immigrants in Germany. A substantial sample of both written and spoken data collected from Turkish-German bilingual students in Hamburg, Germany formed the data and the analyses were carried out within the theories of Third Language Acquisition and Functional Pragmatics. Analysis revealed that the subjects have difficulty acquiring the rigid SVO word order of English and disregarding their native language knowledge of Turkish, they tend to apply word order rules of German, that are thought to be motivated from the pragmatic needs of the learners. To validate the findings, data were collected from English learners of Turkish monolinguals living in Turkey and the findings were compared.