Abstract:

This study is prepared to investigate students’errors in a comparative way, the errors of students whose foreign languages (L2) is English and second foreign language (L3) is French, that result from negative transferring to French language from knowledge of English particularly knowledge of syntax of English. According to the survey conducted on January 2011, the subject matter of this study is the students whose first language is english about 98% and who are from French Language Teaching Department in the Faculty of Education in Gazi University. Midterms, final exams and students’homework were investigated meticulously in the academic years of 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 to designate error types that students make frequently, resulted from English syntax. Specified errors were classified and dealt with sample. The study reveals that the identified errors results from the nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, relative clauses and possesive adjectives’ different usage in English and French syntactically and students’tendency to transfer their knowledge of English to French negatively. Therefore the identified errors result from the negative transferring between two languages. The differences of syntax topics are not limited. However, due to the limitations in this study, we mention about the differences briefly.

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