Abstract
This paper reports a study conducted to investigate lexically-motivated variability in the acquisition of basic sentence structures among EFL beginners. The subjects were 150 first-year junior high school students. Nine basic sentence structures were chosen for this purpose and transformed into a partial translation test. For each sentence structure two different types of target sentences were prepared for translation; those with familiar lexical combinations and those with unfamiliar ones. An analysis of the results of the translation test revealed a significant degree of lexically-motivated variability in the acquisition of basic sentence structures among the subjects. It also revealed that slow learners are generally more vulnerable to surface lexical variation than good learners. Implications of these findings for SLA research and second language teaching are also discussed.
