A Study on the Acquisition Order of Nominal Clauses of Middle School English Learners

1、中學(xué)英語學(xué)習(xí)者名詞性從句習(xí)得順序研究a study on the acquisition order of nominal clauses of middle school english learnerscontentsabstract.key words.i. introduction. a. research purpose. b. research significance.ii. literature review.a. clauses.b. previous studies about slac. previous studies about relative clauses.ii

2、i. research.a. research questions.b. research subjectsc. research instruments.d. research methode. research designf. datag. data analysis.iv. conclusion.a. summaryb. limitationsc. expectationsreference. a study on the acquisition order of nominal clauses of middle school english learnersabstract in

3、recent years, scholars researched relative clauses acquisition from different perspectives, but studies conducted about the acquisition of nominal clauses is inadequate. the present research will adopt the corpus of research method to explore the acquisition order of the nominal clauses for middle s

4、chool english learners, trying to reveal the acquisition rule of nominal clauses. through this research, make teachers and students have reflections on teaching and learning strategies and provide suggestions for teachers teaching activities design, material selection and method design.key words: ac

5、quisition order; nominal clauses; middle school english learners摘要近年來國外學(xué)者從不同角度對各類關(guān)系從句的習(xí)得情況進(jìn)行了研究，但很少關(guān)注到名詞性從句。本文將采用語料庫的研究方法，以中學(xué)英語學(xué)習(xí)者為研究對象，來探討中國英語學(xué)習(xí)者名詞性從句的習(xí)得順序問題，試圖揭示中國學(xué)習(xí)者名詞性從句的習(xí)得規(guī)律。通過本研究，反思教學(xué)中教和學(xué)策略，并為教師教學(xué)活動設(shè)計(jì)、方法設(shè)計(jì)提供建議。關(guān)鍵字：習(xí)得順序；名詞性從句；中學(xué)英語學(xué)習(xí)者i. introductiona. research purpose sentence is the highest lev

6、el of grammatical structure, also is the basic language unit of the text. the sentence that has two or more subject-predicate structure is called complex sentence. a dependent clause (also subordinate clause) is a clause used in conjunction with the independent clause (also main clause), augmenting

7、or attributing it. dependent clauses cannot stand alone as a sentence; instead, they always modify the independent clause of a sentence. although a dependent clause contains a subject and a predicate, it sounds incomplete when standing alone. if the role of the clause in the sentence is equivalent t

8、o a noun, it is called the nominal clauses.the sentences in actual use always appear in certain context. its always interrelated and interconstraint between sentence and sentence or sentence and context. its this relation that decides the communication of a sentence. that is, it can be said that nom

9、inal clauses play a vital part in peoples communication.b. research significance recently, for syntactic aspects, scholars both at home and abroad study relative clauses acquisition from different angels. judging from what is known, syntactic types and lexical semantics is considered affecting relat

10、ive clauses processing and acquisition difficulty of important factor. when it comes to syntactic type factors, the researchers, taking the perspectives of syntactic function, syntactic transfer and cognitive processing of syntactic structures, conduct some explorations and propose some theoretical

11、assumptions. about lexical semantic factors, the researchers mainly from the noun attributes and types of relative clauses to explore the influence of lexical semantic on clause acquisition difficulty. when tracing the history of sla, the studies conducted about the acquisition of nominal clauses ar

12、e inadequate. therefore, we need further research on it. the present research will explore english learners acquisition order of nominal clauses. it aims to answer the acquisition order, make teachers and students have reflections on teaching and learning strategies and provide suggestions for teach

13、ers teaching activities design, material selection and method design.ii. literature reviewsla has already developed into an independent edge-crossed discipline over 30 years development, in recent years the second language acquisition areas continue to expand. considering this topic of the research,

14、 the related literature review includes three aspects:a. definition and categories of clausein grammar, a clause is a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in some languages and some types of clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase. it may

15、 instead be marked on the verb (this is especially common in null subject languages). the most basic kind of sentence consists of a single clause. more complicated sentences may contain multiple clauses, including clauses contained within clauses.under this classification scheme, there are three mai

16、n types of dependent clauses: noun clauses, adjective clauses, and adverb clauses, so-called for their syntactic and semantic resemblance to nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, respectively.a noun clause can be used like a noun. it can be a subject, predicate nominative, direct object, appositive, indir

17、ect object, or object of the preposition. some of the words that introduce noun clauses are that, whether, who, why, whom, what, how, when, whoever, where, and whomever. noun clauses include four types: subject clause (sc), object clause (oc), apposition clause (ac), predictive clause (pc). for exam

18、ple:how this happened is not clear to anyone. (sc)that we shall be late is certain. (sc)the seller demanded that payment should be made with 5days. (oc)she asked me which i liked best. (oc)the fact that the money has gone does not mean it was stolen. (ac)the suggestion that the new rule be adopted c

19、ame from the chairman. (ac)the trouble is that i have lost his address. (pc)that is what he meant. (pc)b. previous study about sla1. studies abroadcurrently, sla research will understand the essence of second language acquisition from theoretical level about 3 aspects: 1) how does cognitive mechanis

20、m make learners transfer from mother language to second language? 2) why does language transfer have not an influence on mother language acquisition, but have a great influence on sla. 3) why do second language learners differ in level of acquiring language? based on these major theoretical subjects

21、, the second language acquisition research made the following theoretical achievements.a. on second language learners ability: canale pointed out that second languagelearners in the process of learning a second language have formed three abilities: language ability, communicative ability, strategy a

22、bility (l. f. wang 1). li xiaoju called it language ability, textual ability, pragmatic competence (35). b. about the study of interlanguage : at present, the learner-centered interlanguage study has been already widely acknowledged. but, corpus-based studies have not received enough attention. in r

23、ecent years, professor s. granger, in louvain university of belgium, established international corpus of learner english (icle) and international corpus spoken english interlanguage (icsei) (he 76-77).c. on the sla language transfer: language transfer problem has always been the focus of the study o

24、f scholars both at home and abroad. migration is a kind of communication strategies, also a kind of learning strategies.d. about sla modularization and cognitive mechanism: sla researchers havebeen exploring the modularization and the cognitive mechanism issues, that is, modular mechanism that forme

25、d by language rules. some scholars think that the acquisition of second language rules relies on internal modules and universal grammar (ug) acquisition mechanism.2. studies at homesecond language acquisition is a complex cognitive activity, and language acquisition process is the cognitive process

26、of language. the review mainly states domestic sla cognitive study from following two aspects:a. language acquisition hypothesis;the early 1970s to the 1980s, klashen establishes and develops a complete set of second language acquisition theories (also called “monitoring model”). the theory framewor

27、k has five hypotheses: acquisition and learning hypothesis, monitory hypothesis, natural order hypothesis, input hypothesis, filter hypothesis (y. wang 70).b. cognitive psychology study of sla;wu qianlong presented a brains attention and working memory as the center of the model through perspectives

28、 of cognitive psychology to analyze sla process. he thinks that cognitive psychology analysis may have inspiration to us in materials design, language materials input aspects (290-292).for second language knowledge system of cognitive construction, liu liming explores interlanguage phenomenon from t

29、he perspective of cognitive psychology. he thinks, interlanguage is produced by learners autonomy of creativity when they build target language psychological syntactic system. dai weidong thinks that the occurrence of interlanguage receives the restriction of language, psychological and social cogni

30、tive and intermediary language system itself. therefore, interlanguage must follow its own constructing rule, and the establishment of the rule is based on the interaction between mother tongue and second language.cognitive research on sla will improve peoples view of the nature of language.and the

31、researchs direct significance lies in the improvement of language teaching effect. domestic cognitive study on sla be sure to promote domestic sla theory research, thus providing further inspiration for language teaching.c. previous studies about relative clauses recently, for syntactic aspects, sch

32、olars both at home and abroad study relative clauses acquisition from different angels. judging from what is known, syntactic types and lexical semantics are considered the important factors affecting relative clauses processing and acquisition difficulty.1. syntactic types:keenan & comrie put forwa

33、rd “noun phrase accessibility hierarchy hypothesis, naph” (146). according to antecedents function in the clause, they get accessibility hierarchy: subject direct object indirect object prepositions object compare object. in this level it means that antecedent as subject is most accessible, then dir

34、ect and indirect object, while comparative object is the least one.sheldon proposes “parallel function hypothesis, pfh” (56). he considers antecedents syntactic function between main clause and clause, also assumes when its function is different between main clause and subordinate clauses, which wil

35、l increase the difficulty of processing. conversely, it will decrease. so that the difficulty in order: ss/oo os/so (the first s/o refers to antecedent functions as subject or direct object in main clause; the latter s/o refers to antecedent functions as subject or direct object in relative clause )

36、.macwhinney and macwhinney pose “perspective shift hypothesis, psh” (147). the assumption thinks perspective can be the subject of the sentence in psycholinguistics. when perspective and the process of master-slave compound sentence are contacted, perspective may produce change, or transfer, or leav

37、e. the sentences that left perspectives are more easily processed than those transfer perspectives. if transfer more, processing is more difficult. thus the difficulty order: ss os/oo so.from the angle of working memory, scholars raise “pdh” and “sohh”. they found that different types of relative cl

38、auses have different demands for memory capacity. if increasing pressure to peoples working memory, it will increase the process difficulty of relative clauses. kuno proposes “perceptual difficulty hypothesis, pdh”, basing on the function of the antecedent in the main clause (147). he thinks that th

39、e relative clause embedded into the subject of the main clause discontinues peoples analysis process of the main clause and increases the burden of the peoples working memory, so it is more difficult to deal with. while one embedded into the object of the main clause doesnt influence the analysis of

40、 the main clauses. therefore, the acquisition order should be: os/ooss/so.hamilton, according to processing discontinuity times that caused by accessibility and embeddedness, puts forward “so hierarchy hypothesis, sohh”, that is osoo/ssso (the first s/o refers to antecedent functions as subject or d

41、irect object in main clause; the latter s/o refers to antecedent functions as subject or direct object in relative clause ) (147). he thinks that the more processing discontinuity the brain gets, the more pressure to memorize, the more difficulties to acquire the relative clause.2. lexical semantics

42、when some scholars study the difficulty sequence of relative clauses acquisition, focusing on examining the influence of syntactic type, but in recent years, some scholars try to find new influence factors, for example, to explore processing of relative clauses from semantic factors. main representa

43、tives have gordenetal, maketal, traxleretal, etc. the most important semantic factors include: the animation of the noun, the reference of the noun, the similarities between central noun and noun in relative clauses. research shows that the influence of animation lies in the difference of two terms.

44、 when the main clause subject is a lifeless noun and the central word functions as object, the output of relative clauses is easy. while gordeneta.l assumes if the attributes of central noun and noun as subject in the relative clause are the same, such sentence is more difficult to process than a se

45、ntence with different attributes. but, the meaning of the similarity that they put forward is still not clearly defined, and their experiment cannot be completely verifying their assumption. therefore, the research based on the semantic factors needs further explore. at home, li jingman, wang tongsh

46、un and hou jiandong also discuss the semantic factors (huang and song 147).through the above literature retrieval, it can be found that studies on sla relates to lexical and relative clauses. but the studies in syntactic aspects are very few, especially on nominal clauses.iii. researcha. research qu

47、estionsthe present research is to take an empirical approach, quantitative method in practice, aiming to exploring the acquisition order of the nominal clauses for msel. the research question is by what rules the chinese msel acquire the nominal clauses. specifically, it includes the following four

48、aspects:1. in what order do the msel acquire subject clauses?2. in what order do the msel acquire object clauses?3. in what order do the msel acquire apposition clauses?4. in what order do the msel acquire predictive clauses?b. research subjectsthe research subjects are the students of shihezi numbe

49、r 1 middle school, xinjiang province. they are junior 3 students, senior 1 students, senior 2 students and senior 3 students. the 10 boys and girls in each grade, and average age is 16 years, and most students begin learning english from primary school grade 3, and the average english learning age i

50、s 5 years, and the overall standard of english is lower-middle or middle.c. research instruments d. research methodthis study adopts corpus research methods and collects the article 80 of shihezi no.1 middle school students composition. they are 20 articles for junior 3 learners, 20 articles for sen

51、ior 1 learners, 20 articles for senior 2 learners and 20 articles for senior 3 learners. because each grade students learning age is different, the author asks the 20 students of every grade to write the same topic composition and the topic of every grade is different. the composition of grade stude

52、nts includes about 120 words. the composition of high school students includes about 150 words. all the students finish compositions in 45 minutes and hand their works to the teacher. the author received a total of 80 pieces of valid compositions.e. research designbased on perception of problems, id

53、entification of problems, selection of methods, in the process of research, the procedures are designed as follows:the first step is to select the subjects and collect data. the author chooses the students of shihezi no.1 middle school. they are junior 1 students, senior 1 students, senior 2 student

54、s and senior 3 students. and every grade has 20 leaners. so the author collects 80 pieces of writings.the second step is to mark out subject clause (sc)、object clause (oc)、 apposition clause (ac) and predictive clause (pc) in each composition.the third step is to calculate the number of every kind o

55、f clauses in each grades composition and the results show in the following table 1.table 1studentsnumber of clausesscocpcacjunior 302500senior 113350senior 233764senior 353733the next is to enter the data that shows in the table 1 into computer. use excel 2003 to calculate the average of each kind o

56、f clauses and get table 2.step 4 is to descriptive statistic data and analysis the results.f. data and data analysis the author analyzed corpus that have been collected to know the situation of learners using nominal clauses and their acquisition order. calculate the average of each kind of clauses

57、and get table 2.table 2scocpcacjunior 301.2500senior 10.051.650.250senior 20.151.850.250.2senior 30.251.850.150.15 according to table 1 and figure 1, for junior 3 learners, subject clauses have not been applied in their compositions, which implies that the 20 subjects are incompetent to use the grammatical structure of sc. th