Morpho-syntactic errors in Maltese, performed by children whose first language (L1) is English and whose second language (L2) is Maltese

Abstract

Maltese as a second and/or foreign language is explored in this study, which sets out to investigate different types of morpho-syntactic errors in Maltese identified in the writing of children aged between 7 and 11 whose first language (L1) is English and who acquire and/or learn Maltese as their L2. This study examines written Maltese data from 25 participants pertaining to three language groups: a Maltese-dominant, English dominant and balanced bilingual group. All the participants are given a set of 7 short writing tasks to complete in 1 session, with each task focusing on the elicitation of particular morpho-syntactic structures. The 25 scripts are then analysed in order to identify all the morpho-syntactic errors, to group these errors into error types and to further explore these errors in relation to the language dominant groups. The findings indicate that the English-dominant participants commit a large number of errors when compared to the Maltese-dominant and balanced bilingual participants, with the most common error types of the English-dominant participants being ‘Verb’, ‘Gender Agreement’ and ‘Number Agreement’ errors.