Huang Lijun
This thesis is to examine the difficulties my students encounter in their SLA. Particular attention is paid to the marked features in English for Chinese learners---- simple past verb form in morphological category and interrogatives in syntactic category. Markedmess Differential Hypothesis is recommended to explain why the difficulties occur and how the students’ L1 has an effect on L2. Principles of developmental sequences and teachability hypothesis help to explain how the students could succeed in learning these forms. In the fourth part of this thesis, English content word and English/Chinese idiomatic expressions are discussed to further reinforce the “markedness” hypothesis.
My students are the first-year college students of Computer Science in Sichuan University. They come from 8 different provinces in China. One third of them are born in big cities such as Beijing, Shijiazhuang, Chengdu and Chongqing, while the rest come from small towns and villages. At the very early stage of college study, they acquire, averagely, more or less 3000 thousand words of English vocabulary, and they have learned the fundamental principles of English grammar ( tense, voice, interrogation, subject-verb agreement, relative clauses, noun clauses etc). Thus, they can read simple English essays and write one or two paragraphs in English, in which some ungrammatical expressions are employed due to their poor proficiency level of English language. They are required to pass the nationwide CET-4 (College English Test Band 4), which tests the candidates’ comprehensive language abilities in English--- listening, reading. writing, and translating.
I meet my students 4 hours per week ( 2 hours at one time) Mainly, I teach them intensive reading, which involves dominantly in the instruction of usage of English words, phrases, grammar rules and reading and writing skills as well. In most cases, I act as an information giver in the classroom and sometimes as a trainer to drill them to consolidate what they have learned.
The simple past
Taking their forms into consideration, English verbs can be divided into two categories: regular verb and irregular verb. Regular verbs are verbs whose forms can be predicted by rules. Irregular verbs are verbs whose past tense and past participle forms are not predictable by rules.
Regular verbs are formed in the following ways:
1). The past tense forms are spelt by adding –d or –ed to the base form. If the base form ends with –e, then –d is added; if the base form doesn’t end with –e, then –ed is added.
i.e. arrive-----arrived wait------waited
2) If the base form ends with a consonant, the final consonant is doubled if the base form consists of only one syllable or is accented on the last syllable.
i.e. stop-----stopped prefer----preferred
3) If the base form ends with a consonant followed by a “ y”, the “ y” is replaced by “i” and the –ed is added.
i.e. cry-----cried carry----carried
Irregular verbs are different from regular verbs. There are no rules for them , hence their forms are various.
i.e. bet-----bet build----built stand-----stood
Mentioned above is the general rules of the forms of the simple past verbs. Since there is not inflections in Chinese to indicate the tense, students tends to make errors when applying the simple past tense. Following is the errors my students make in their simple past tense acquisition.
i) overgeneralization of regular form principle 1). The base form ends with –e, but –ed is added.
i.e. He phoneed me last night. They arriveed at the island.
ii) simplification of regular form principle 2). The base form ends with a consonant, consisting of only one syllable or being accented on the last syllable, but only –ed is added.
i.e. They robed the bank at day time.
We stoped talking when the teacher came in.
iii) overgeneralization of regular form principle3). The base form ends with a vowel followed by a “y”, but the “y” is still replaced by “i” and –ed is added.
i.e. The old couple staied overnight in the inn.
The little boy praied for his mother’s safety.
iv) overgeneralization of regular forms into irregular forms. –ed is added to the irregular verbs.
i.e. I maked an appointment with my teacher.
I cutted my finger when I was helping my mother cooking.
Word order in interrogatives:
In interrogative sentence, the first word is either a verb (eg. Is, are, do, shall, will) or a question word ( eg. Who, when, what, why, where, how). The subject comes after:
1) the auxiliary verb
Shall we go? How did you get there?
2) the only verb in the sentence
Is Peter a good teacher? Are you happy?
Except when the question word is whether the subject or a part of the subject.
Who killed Jack?
Which cup is yours?
The errors my students make in applying the interrogative sentences are various.
i) simplification of interrogative sentence.( yes/no question) A rise tone is used at the end of declarative sentence, rather than the verb or auxiliary verb is put to the front of the sentence.
You are tired? She will go with you?
ii) overuse of link verb. The verb ‘be’ is put at the beginning of sentence in whatever the case is.
Is your father is busy?
Are you finished your homework?
iii)
No fronting of WH-word. The word
order remains the same as that in declarative sentence.
You like what?
We shall meet at where?
iv) WH-word is put at the beginning of the sentence, but the inversion of the subject and auxiliary verb doesn’t occur.
Why you went there alone?
How I can improve my English.
V) overgeneralization of inversion. Inversions are overgeneralized to embedded questions.
I wonder where did she go.
Would you please tell me how can I go to the bus stop?
Error analysis
Linguistic notions of “ markedness” are usually defined in terms of complexity, relative influence of use or departure from something that is more basic, typical or canonical in a language. To put it simply, “markedness” refers to the linguistic features which are in one language, but not in another. Eckman’s Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman 1977,1985) makes three predictions.
1) Those areas of L2 which differ from the L1, and are more marked that the L1 will be difficult.
2) The relative degree of difficulty of areas of the L2 which are more marked that the L1 will correspond to the relative degree of markedness.
3) Those areas of the L2 which are different from the L1, but are not more marked than the L1, will not be difficult
MDH helps explain the difficulties students encounter and errors they make in the SLA.
Simple past tense is one markedness in English since Chinese has no inflections to indicate the tense. i.e. He phoned me last night./ Ta zuo wan gei wo da dian hua. The verb ‘phoned’ with inflection –ed indicates the event happened in the past, even without the time phrase “ last night”. But in Chinese, the verb “da” in the past tense is morphologically the same as it expresses a present action. Knowing the difference between Chinese and English, students are very sensitive to the regular –ed form. They apply it in both necessary cases and unnecessary cases. So they make errors like ‘arriveed”,’phoneed’,’staied’,’praied’. The double-consonant form and the irregular form are more marked in English for Chinese students. Before they can recognize the verbs are one-syllable words or irregular verbs, they apply “-ed” form in both cases. So they make errors like “robed”, “stoped”.”maked” “cutted”. Certainly, the students employ various learning strategies to make sense of what they have been instructed in classroom and to control their own output. Overgeneralization and simplification are the two main strategies they employ.
Some items, rules and subsystems of the interlanguage may result from transfer from the first language. The word order of Chinese interrogative sentence is sharply different from English ones. As for yes/no question, Chinese interrogative sentence has the same word order if declarative sentence, having the question word “ma” at the end of sentence.
i.e.
Are you tired?
You are tired.
Ni lei ma?
Ni lei le.
Before students acquire the word order in
interrogative sentence, they transfer the Chinese word order when asking a
question in English, with the rise intonation at the end of the sentence. i.e.
You are tired? You wanted tea?
The position of WH-words is flexible in Chinese sentence. They can be at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a sentence. WH-words are invariably at the beginning of a sentence in English to indicate an interrogative sentence. WH- movement is a complicated process. Before the students can correctly employ the WH-movement, they transfer the Chinese word order into their interlanguage
i.e.
You like what?
Why you went there alone?
Ni xi huan shen me? Wei shen me ni du zi qu na li?
In conclusion, learning difficulty generally results from L1-L2 difference, involving greater L2 markedness, not from difference involving less L2 markedness, with degree of difficulty reflecting degree of markedness. L1 also has great effect on SLA. It can lead to errors by the use of a developmental form similar to an L1 structure.
I.
Principles of developmental
sequence and interrogatives
According to recent research on interlanguage, ILs exhibit common acquisition orders and developmental sequences. Although ILs are highly variable, they are also systematic. Documented acquisition orders and developmental sequences show a high degree of uniformity. In combination with the linguistic environment, both the innate language-specific endowment and the powerful cognitive contribution by the learners are held to underlie observable developmental sequences and common error types by learners.
A striking example of systematicity of IL consists of common developmental sequence within morpho-syntactic domains. All learners seem to pass through it, regardless of age, native language or learning context. The sequence consists of ordered series of IL structures, approximation to a target construction, each reflecting an underlying stage of development. Stages in a sequence are not discrete, but overlap. To qualify as a “stage”, however, each potential stage must be ordered ( with respect to other stages in a sequence) and obligatory. Therefore, the developmental order is distinguished by a number of stages which acquisition progresses. The interrogatives emerge in a predicable sequence.
Stage One: Statement marked with rising intonation
Stage Two: WH-appears but are accompanied by statements and without AUX.
Stage Three: Inversion appears but is overgeneralized
Stage Four: Learned reaches full target system.
Let’s take a look at the errors the students make in interrogatives acquisition and see how they can achieve the target system developmentally. At stage 1, questions are formed by marking statement with rising intonation, e.g. “ You are tired? At stage 2, WH-questions appear, but without subject-verb inversion, indeed often without an auxiliary verb at all, e.g. “ Why you went there alone?”. At stage 3, inversion enters. It is applied correctly in yes/no questions and WH-questions such as “ May I use your computer?” and “ What are they talking about?”. But it is overgeneralized to embedded questions, as in “ She knows where is the shopping center.” And “ I wonder how can I improve my English?”. Finally, at stage 4, the learner reaches the full target system, differentiating between simple and embedded WH-Questions, inverting in the former only.
The Teachability Hypothesis predicts that the teachability of an item, will always be constrainted by its learnability. The device at one stage is part of what is required for operations at the next stage and none of the abstract stages of processing complexity can be bypassed. Items will only be successfully taught when learners are psycholinguistically “ready” to learn them. That is to say, despite receiving instruction aimed at achieving this, learners should not be able to skip a stage in a developmental sequence, given that each stage depends upon the availability of processing strategies at previous stages, plus a new one.
At stage 1, students employ the regular form principle by adding –ed to the base form, i.e. “ waited”, “ acted”. At stage 2, students add only –d to the base form which ends with –e, i.e. “ arrived”, “phoned”. Because they are not linguistically “ready” to recognize the double-consonant form and irregular form, students still use “stoped”, “maked” in their sentences. At stage 3, students learn to recognize the double-consonant form and double the final consonant, i.e. “stopped”, “preferred”. At stage 4, students employ the irregular form, i.e. “bet”, “built”, “made”. Thus, students begin the period of instruction at stage 1, then progress to stage2 and stage3 which are in a wider range of linguistic context, and finally reach the stage 4 after being instructed the principles of irregular forms.
To conclude, what is needed for an English teacher is an integrated approach that incorporates both language learning and cognitive process. Instructions, exposure, practice and internal processing will interact to lead to the spontaneity and fluency in a second language.
Generally, English content words contain more meaning per unit than Chinese character. As Chinese “words” consist of a single root morpheme, the “grammatical meaning” is often not inherent in individual content word. For example, Chinese word can’t indicate case, with the empty word “de” employed to show possessive case. Chinese learners will write “ a friend of my father” instead of “ a friend of my father’s”, “ a daughter of you colleague” instead of “ a daughter of your colleague’s”. Also Chinese words have no inflections such as “-er”, “-or” “-ess” to indicate gender. The two characters “nan” and “nu” are employed to show gender difference. So, Chinese learners sometimes use “ woman waiter”, “ woman actor” to refer to “ waitress”, “actress”.
Another striking feature of
Chinese words is that the exact some Chinese character can represent many
different lexical categories. (e.g the same character “jian kang” can
mean the noun health, the adjective healthy, the adverb healthily, or the
stative verb, is-healthy). So the Chinese learners write phrases and sentences
like, “ my view on healthy”, “ Smoking does harm to our healthy.”
In contrast to English words, the meanings of Chinese character are highly context-dependent. English words, generally, have a well-defined meaning associated with a particular orthographic representation, while the meaning of Chinese character is variable. E.g. “gao” means “high” or “height” literally. But in different context, it contains different meaning. “gao ao” = pride, complacency, “gao cai sheng”= excellent/top students, “gao diao”= empty eloquence, “gao jian”=wise advice, “gao kao”=entrance examination to college, “gao zhao”= good idea. Chinese learners have difficulty expressing in English these Chinese characters with” gao”, but nothing with the meaning “ high” or “height”.
Idioms are an important part of the language and culture of a society. They are often hard to understand, and harder to use correctly. They are almost impossible to understand from the meaning of the individual words. With English idioms, even the same words may have different meanings. For example, the phrase “look out” means differently in each of the following situation: “ Look out! The car is coming.” “ Look out of the window! It’s raining outside.” A great amount of such idioms cause great difficulties for the Chinese learners to achieve target-like competence.
Chinese idioms are closely associated with the geography, history, literature and sports. However, in spite of the dissimilar cultural background of the Chinese and the English-speaking people, there are some idioms that in the two languages that are equivalent or close approximates. This is beneficial for the learners to acquire the English idioms.
i.e. Strike while the
iron is hot 趁 热 打 铁
Haste makes waste. 欲 速 则 不 达
Look before you leap. 三 思 而 后 行
What frustrates students most is the idioms with surface similarity but actual semantic differences.
i.e. 令 人 发 指 to make one’s hair stand on end
The Chinese expression is used to show anger, whereas the English is for fear
自 食 其 言 to eat one’s own word
The Chinese means to go back on one’s word, i.e. to break one’s promise. The English means to be forced to take back one’s words, usually accompanied by a sense of humiliation.
Therefore, Chinese students are more likely to accept idioms which seem semantically transparent to them, but to reject those which seem semantically opaque. Here comes again the “markedness” hypothesis. Whether an item is marked or unmarked governs the learnability and transferability. The learning of morphology, syntax and idioms will be constrained by the learner’s perception of L1-L2 distance, with marked forms being potentially less transferable than unmarked ones.
References:
Larsen-Freeman, Diane and Michael H. Long 1991 An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research, Addison Wesley Longman Inc. New York
McLaughlin, Barry, 1987 Theories of Second- Language Learning, Edward Arnold Ltd, London
White Lydia and Juffs Alan, Constraints on Wh-Movement in Two Different Context of Nonnative Language Acquisition: Competence and Processing. In Hynn S.G. Martohardjono and W.O’Neil (Eds) (1998) The Generative Study of L2 Acquisition.
V.Cook 1993 Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition Chapter 5
McLaughlin Barry Restructuring. In Applied Linguistics, 1990: vol 11:2 pp.113-128