Lexical and grammatical development in English in Indonesian kindergarten children : processability theory and developmentally moderated focus on form

Abstract

This thesis is an investigation of how Indonesian kindergarten children develop their English as a foreign language (EFL) through classroom interaction. It does this by examining the acquisition of their early English lexicon and grammatical development, with a focus on plural expressions. The data were collected in a kindergarten located in Bandung, the capital city of West Java province where many languages are used in everyday life. The kindergarten in this study offers a three-hour English L2 program each school day with rather broad guidelines consisting of weekly themes in line with the general kindergarten educational program rather than proposing detailed linguistic modules. A further aim of this project was to canvass teacher's and parents' perceptions of the children learning English L2. The study reveals that all the children, regardless of the time they had been involved in the English program, were at the single-word stage at the beginning of the experiment. They all acquired plural marking by the end of the DMFonF intervention, as well as increased their lexicon. Most of them also acquired plural agreement within the Noun Phrase. Six months after the post-test, children maintained their lexical and grammatical knowledge of English. This suggests that DMFonF and feedback are effective in promoting grammatical as well as lexical development in a second language and enable the teacher to create opportunities to pay attention to form and increase accuracy. Also, the study found that both teacher's and parents' perceptions were positive regarding the English L2 program. This study contributes fresh evidence to the field of SLA through a longitudinal study of English lexical and grammatical development in Indonesian kindergarten children, confirming results in other second languages, such as Di Biase (2002) with Italian, and expanding the DMFonF database. Thus, this study encourages L2 teachers to provide a more detailed syllabus construction of L2 structures and focusing strategies based on the current development of the pupils. Parents' informal support and aspirations for their children may contribute to strengthening the children's capital and learning of English L2 outside the classroom.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English