Awareness of second language inflectional morphology: A case study on Finnish as a second language

Abstract

The Finnish language has a very extensive inflectional morphology, whereas Vietnamese, as an isolating language, has no inflection at all. Therefore, the major challenge encountered by Vietnamese immigrants learning Finnish is to develop awareness of the existence, function and use of inflection. This paper examines how this process manifests itself in native-non-native speaker (NS-NNS) conversations during the initial stages of second language acquisition. All the negotiation sequences including overt signals of problems in understanding were subjected to a closer analysis, and the linguistic modifications performed to solve the problems were analysed on the level of both interaction and grammar. In this paper, the focus is on the observable signs of gradually growing morphological awareness, and especially the receptive segmenting skills of the learners.