Question Structures from A Movie in L2 English Learns’ Writing Based on Government & Binding Theory: A Case Study of Business English Student, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University*

บทคัดย่อ

Asking and answering questions play important role in everyday life communication. Thai and English question structures are different in terms of fi rst and second language learning. The aims of this study are to explore the students’ ability on question writing through a movie in english learning and analyze those question structure types. This is a qualitative research. A purposively sampling group is 199 students majoring in Business English, Suan Sunadha Rajabhat University. Data collection instruments are two parts of question-answer reported forms. The movie was divided into nine parts; the students were assigned to make three questions and answers after watching nine parts of the movie called “The Devil wears Prada” at least 27 sentences for each students. It is an outside the classroom activity for 15 weeks in English for Secretary and Advertising I, 2016-2017 academic year. The data were analyzed by Government & Binding Theory: transformational rules. The 190 ungrammatical sentences (from overall 3,176 wh-questions) were selected to be analyzed. The similar questions were excluded. The results show that: from wh-question types: what, when, where, why, who, whom, which and how. The most who-questions students chosen and made mistakes are: why-structure (110), how (19) and what (17) are respectively. Considering the transformational rules used are as “Why with VP negation” with Surface structure (SS): Why did Andrea not come to the company ahead of time to prepare for work for the first day? [CP why [C did [IP Andrea not come to the company ahead of time to prepare for work for the first day]]]. Transformational rules are used as: 1) Negation, 2) Subject –to-Subject raising, 3) Infinitival clause, 4) Wh-movement, 5) Do-insertion, and 6) Inversion. English writing process is more complex for english second learners (L2). Those are not getting familiar by Thai students. It reflects that Thai interference is one of the reasons for these types of syntactic errors.