-S morphemes in L2 English : An investigation into student essays in grades 6, 9, and 12 in Sweden

Swedish students’ morpheme acquisition order in English, including the acquisition of -s morphemes, is a relatively unstudied topic. Given the morphological differences between the English and Swedish languages, students learning English in Sweden may encounter difficulties in the use of the third person singular present tense -s morpheme. Research also shows that Swedish students use the plural -s morpheme rather accurately at 9-10 years old. Mapping out the usage of the -s morphemes may pave the way for understanding the difficulties learners encounter in the use of such morphemes. Furthermore, looking into the usage of morphemes that have the same form but different grammatical functions (e.g.,-s morphemes) may help us understand the relationship between different proficiency levels and the accuracy rate of morpheme usage in L2 English. To this end, this study investigates a corpus of texts produced by students learning English in Sweden in grades 6, 9 and 12. The focus is particularly on the frequency and accuracy of the use of -s morphemes, aiming at revealing which type of -s morphemes has a higher accuracy rate. The results show that the accuracy rate with the plural -s morpheme is relatively higher, whereas the possessive -‘s morpheme is the most problematic one across all levels. Additionally, the largest issue with the contracted verb form of be -‘s was that the students did not add an apostrophe between the word and the -s, rather than not using the form at all. Lastly, the third person singular present tense-s accuracy was very low in grade 6 but increased a lot through grade 9 and 12 where more complex subjects were the largest issue. However, the results indicate that further research with a larger corpus size is required to be able to generalize the findings.