An Analysis of Wh-questions in English and Ko...

An Analysis of Wh-questions in English and Kokborok in the Framework of LGB

Author Name : Shyamal Das

ABSTRACT

In second language (L2) pedagogy first language is a necessary evil. At the syntactic level word order disparity between the two, presence vs. absence of movements of itemsin the processes of transformation, unique morph syntactic elements etc. threatens the process of learning the L2. To negotiate with this problem and for an effective teaching of a second language to the mature learners a Comparative Grammar Teaching mode (CGT) is effective, advisable but long awaited. Born of this strong conviction and of my three decades of English language teaching experience at the tertiary level an attempt has been made here to project a model of CGT. The paper, an offshoot of an ongoing study, compares the wh-questions (also yes-no questions) in Kokborok (a Tibeto Burman language spoken in Tripura, India) and English. Within its limited scope the study attempts to bring out the dissimilarities (with implicit similarities) between the interrogative constructions in the two systems. The generativist approach of Chomsky (1981) has been adopted as the mainstay of the analytical framework.

Keywords: Kokborok, Comparative Grammar Teaching