Acquisition of grammatical category of gender in lithuanian as a foreign language: a beginners' case study

This case study investigates the acquisition of grammatical category of gender in Lithuanian as foreign language. Gender is a complex grammatical phenomenon which belongs to the domains of syntax, morphology and semantics. As far as this paper is concerned, the assignment of the grammatical gender is academically recognised to be a difficult task for foreign language learners, especially those, whose native language does not carry the said category. Therefore, the goal of this study is to examine how the beginner adult learners of Lithuanian as a foreign language assign natural and grammatical gender, what difficulties they encounter and what is the reason for that. The MA paper analyses how beginner learners rely on different types of clues (lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic) when assigning gender, how the complexity and frequency of a word form affect its gender assignment and what is the influence of learners native language on the process. The paper consists of the theoretical part and the empirical material analysis. The first part introduces the concept of grammatical category in Lithuanian and the issues concerning the acquisition of grammatical and natural gender in foreign language research. In terms of the second part, 15 Vilnius University students, who attend courses on Lithuanian as foreign language, were asked to participate in three experimental tasks. The first experimental task investigates the assignment of natural gender, while the second and the third tasks examine how beginner learners assign grammatical gender. The results of the experiment have been compared to examples of learners’ natural language production. The empirical analysis of the gathered material is based on the error analysis method. The results of the study revealed that the more gender clues the beginner adult learners of Lithuanian as foreign language could rely on, the more accurate their performances were, however, they made more errors when they had to assign gender to irregular gender forms. It has also been established that participants of the study performed better on unmarked singular nominative forms than on others. Finally, the results of both the experimental tasks and examples the natural language production revealed that beginner adult learners, whose native language has the category of grammatical gender, performed better than the Anglophone learners (as English has no grammatical gender). Since a relatively small number of learners had been involved in the study, its insights should be confirmed by further research. However, this study could appear relevant for researchers of foreign language acquisition and foreign language teachers