Underlying Knowledge vs. Surface Realization: A Study of Oral and Written Competence of the Third Person Singular -s in L2 English

This study was an attempt to analyze an elicited set of data from a second-language speaker of English. The informant was an Arab female student living in an English-speaking country who has had English-language training in an intensive English-language program for approximately one year. The purpose of the study was to identify the utterances, phrases, or dialogues that contain the use of the third-person singular -s (3SG -s) morpheme and investigate the patterns and reasons for the informant’s use of 3SG -s in light of the missing surface inflection hypothesis (MSIH). The research examined the informant’s underlying knowledge of the simple present tense to determine whether the resulting oral production reflected that knowledge. The study utilized two instruments to collect the data: a picture-based task and a sentence completion task. Although the results revealed no significant discrepancy between the informant’s oral and written productions, the study offers explications from other instances in which the 3SG -s was incorrectly used or omitted. While additional tests are needed, the study provides insights for English-language teaching professionals and classroom practices.