Abstract:

Within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, Interlanguage (IL)development has become an important component. In this respect, other relatedissues of IL development as native language factor for transfer situation, and effectsof cross linguistic differences between languages have expanded the interest of theinquiry. This study investigates the IL development of Turkish adult learners ofEnglish in terms of the IL features they employed and L1 effect on their IL, regarding SLA theories. Primary purpose of the study is to examine IL grammar of Turkishadult learners of English considering similarities and differences between learners’acquisition process, the effect of Turkish as native language and learners’ attitudesthat can be accepted as language learning strategies. For this purpose, Dativealternation structures in English have been investigated through various learnerdata elicited from tests and corpus data. Research findings indicated that there isno significant difference in the use of dative structures between learners with different proficiency levels. On the other hand, overgeneralization and undergeneralization of some certain structures have been identified in terms of IL grammar properties and L1 transfer samples

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