Browsing by Subject "semantiikka"

The written skills of Finnish become essential for the secondary school students studying Finnish as a second language and literature (F2). Even though they learn the oral skills of Finnish primarily by communicating with their Finnish-speaking coevals, they will need the written skills after finishing secondary school when proceeding with their studies. When teaching the written skills of Finnish, it is important to focus on the relevant issues to enable the language skills to develop in the desired way. In this study I examine the verbs used in the stories of F2-students. I am also aiming to illustrate the changes of the verbs between the various levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). By examining these changes, I can investigate what kind of verbs indicate into better written skills of Finnish. I examine the verbs in two aspects: semantically and morphosyntactically. This study was conducted as a qualitative research, utilizing the principles of linguistic text anal-ysis. As my research material I used Cefling-corpus, which included stories of secondary school F2-students. The stories are placed in CEFR rating in the levels A1–B2. From these 114 stories I gathered 1814 verbs in total. I categorized them semantically by the classification created by Anneli Pajunen (2001). This classification consists of primary-A-verbs, that describe concrete states of affairs, primary-B-verbs, that represent more abstract conditions, and secondary-verbs that evaluate and proportion the relation between the primary-verbs. In addition, I categorized the verbs morphosyntactically i.e. by their grammatical mood, tense and person mood. I also in-vestigated the use of verb phrases and the negative verb. According to this study, the usage of the verbs seems to have a strong connection with the lan-guage skills of the student. However, the remarkable factor in the evaluation of the writing skills was not only the semantic class of the verb, since the shares of primary-A-, primary-B- and sec-ondary-verbs in different CEFR levels did not change linearly. More value was given to the use of the verb in different situations. Especially on the lower levels of CEFR, the students stuck to the simple verbs that were familiar to them, instead of using verbs specific to the situation. These verbs were typically used clumsily to indicate something that would have been more natural to express with a more specific or complex verb. Based on the material the more complex and spe-cific verbs or the abstract and diverse use of the verbs did indicate for higher writing skills and more fluent text. Teaching the verbs and their derivations as a bunch could be an effective way to expand the vocabulary and written expression skills of the student. Regarding the morphosyn-tax, the quantity of verb phrases, negative verb and the usage of the grammatical mood of the verbs did not seem to have a clear connection with the CEFR levels. However, it seems that alt-hough the students evaluated to levels B1–B2 write more accurately than the pupils on levels A1–A2, they also observe the conventions of the text type of a story more firmly. This can be seen as a high usage of imperfect and a coherent way of referencing. Perhaps utilizing the genre skills more while teaching the verbs would result in learning that would be based on the real-life situations of using the language.