An Analysis of interlanguage of complement usages in Thai university students

Abstract

The study investigates the interlanguage of Thai university students through their usages of complements. The data was collected from English writing assignments of thirty students at two different proficiency levels. The results show that there is no difference in the developmental sequences of complements in the students who study English as the second language and English native children. The data shows that ‘to’ infinitive complements precede ‘ing’ complements and ‘wh’ infinitive complements, respectively. Moreover, ‘that’ complements appear before ‘wh’ complements. Many language strategies are found to be used by the subjects, namely, strategy of second language learning, language transfer, overgeneralization, transfer of training, hypercorrection, strategy of second language communication, and avoidance.