LINGUISTICS STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROLE OF THE SYNTACTIC KNOWLEDGE IN DECODING ENGLISH AMBIGUOUS STRUCTURES

Abstract

It is rather challenging for learners to know how to put words in a sentence in a correct grammatical and logical sense but not ambiguous (Smith, 2015). Despite the need to take into consideration the use of syntax in language learning, the study of Linguistics students’ perspective on the role of the syntactic knowledge in decoding English ambiguous structures has not been conducted in Vietnamese context. This paper reports on the study that analyzed the type of ambiguous structures which cause the most difficulty to Vietnamese linguistics students to identify whether the learned syntactic knowledge could help them interpret these types. The study was conducted by quantitative method including surveys. Besides, qualitative one involved interviews. The theory of X-bar syntax evolved by Noam Chomsky (1950s) was adopted as the theoretical framework for the investigation. The results revealed that the type of syntactic ambiguity that made the most confusion to English linguistics learners is “transitive or ditransitive verb”. Furthermore, although most students acknowledged the essential function of syntax in decoding ambiguous structures, some of them were not accustomed to employing the learned syntax in analyzing sentence structures. Lastly, the application of syntax in teaching grammar and reading skills was recommended by a significant number of students.