IS THE LANGUAGE TEACHABLE?

---------Report and Analysis on the Difficulties of Chinese Students in College English Learning

 

PGDELT 2001         HUANGXIN

 

1.Introduction:

         The students of mine are first-year English majors who are expected to complete a four –year course study. Most of them are trained to be English teachers in secondary schools after graduation. In the college, they are required to cover 7 obligatory modules each semester. Before they were enrolled, they had been tested on language proficiency by a written college entrance exam on English and a supplementary oral test designed for English majors. They have learnt basic grammar and acquired an average vocabulary of 3000-4500. They can express in simple English and communicate with each other on some familiar topics. Their writing performance is much better than spoken one, which implies that formal instruction in their previous classroom learning focused on written form. And they usually do not make communicative use of English outside classroom. Majority of the students are at their average age of 18.

         In their courses, the students are required to attain intermediate-level in such language skills as listening, speaking, reading, and writing in the first year. Listening and speaking abilities are exceptionally emphasized. My teaching course is Basic English, which is claimed to include in content all the fundamental knowledge in grammar and vocabulary and is expected to advocate a provision of basic language skills for the learners. I usually have 6periods of contact with the students each week and each period is 50 minutes. There are 35 students in my class. I generally apply a communicative way to instruct the learners and make it possible for them to develop in language acquisition in natural setting.

        The initial purpose of this paper is to make a brief analysis on the difficulties of my students in their learning of some linguistic items in English. Secondly, I intend to discuss on the possibilities for the learners to overcome these problems and how the interlanguage can be developed in the light of SLA theories we have learnt so far. The final part of the paper will be a reflection of L1 effect on L2 learners’ acquisition of English content words and idiomatic expressions.

 

2.Difficulties of Chinese Students in English Learning

        In my teaching practice, I find many of the students encounter all kinds of difficulties in the acquisition of English. Many factors and constraints may be contributed to theses difficulties, which can be explained from different perspectives sociolinguistically, neuro-psycholinguistically, psycholinguistically or by whatever theory in the field of second language acquisition. Furthermore, these difficulties may themselves be divided into different kinds. In this section, I will mainly discuss the most striking difficulties encountered by my students and apply theoretical concept of markedness and L1 effect on L2 into analysis. These difficulties are categorized into two forms, one lexical the other syntactical, namely English articles and passive structures.

2.1.Articles

        Chomsky created the concept of “markedness” in his influential theory of Universal Grammar. “Linguistic notions of ‘markedness’are usually defined in terms of complexity, relative infrequency of use or departure from something that is more basic, typical or canonical in a language.”(Larsen-Freeman, D and Long, M.H.1990) Markedness can also be ascertained typologically when cross-linguistic comparison of languages show that the presence of some linguistic feature implies the presence of another feature. Then, when some linguistic feature presented by one language as unmarked cannot be presented by another language as unmarked, we may say this feature is marked to second language. Theorists researching on this (e.g. Eckman 1977, Kellerman1977, Gundel and Tarone1983, Zobl1983b, 1984.etc.) generally claim that linguistically unmarked features of the L1 will tend to transfer, but that linguistically marked L1 features will not. Eckman further proposed Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman1977, 1985), which comprises the following three predictions:

(a)   Those areas of the L2 which differ from the L2, and are more marked than the L1 will be difficult.

(b)    The relative degree of difficulty in the areas of the L2 which is more marked than the L1 will correspond to the relative degree of markedness.

                   (c) Those areas of the L2 which are different from L1, but are not more marked than the L1, will not be difficult.

        As we know, English article is divided by grammarians into definite and indefinite forms. Indefinite article in English usually functions to refer to (a) a singular form (b) a generic nominal concept. And it requires a certain agreement in number between the article and the noun, that is, a singular noun must follow an indefinite article. But Chinese language doesn’t have such a lexical category to determine a noun. In another word, this can be considered as marked linguistic feature, which doesn’t exist in the L1. According to MDH, the more marked use of indefinite article in English will be difficult for Chinese learners. My students who would try to find some similar forms in the L1 as a strategy to learn this marked linguistic feature in the L2 frequently prove this. They find such content words in Chinese as “一本一个”“一车”“一筐” etc. to compare with English indefinite article in order to establish a bridge leading to target use. As Chinese content words mentioned above do not keep in agreement with a singular form of noun followed, the students usually go through a long way before they govern the rule that an indefinite article in English must be followed by a singular noun form. And I find frequent errors made by my students, which show that they are confused in the differences between the two languages.

        English uses the definite article in two ways. First, it’s used to introduce an anaphoric referent to a particular noun in the recent shared experience of the speaker and the listener. Second, it’s used to refer to a generic nominal concept. But Chinese doesn’t have definite articles in both cases. This will also bring difficulties to the students and may be more difficult. For the first use, students usually use the demonstrative adjectives such as “this” “that” “these” “those” etc. to fulfil the function of definite article. So it is an old story that the students would rather not use definite articles and turn for help from demonstrative adjectives as substitute. For the second use, there is no linguistic device which can be applied by the students to communicate the second notion of “generic the”. These phenomena can be explained by Zero Contrast theory. Zero Contrast refers to that the L2 possess linguistic category that is absent in the learner’s L1. Definite article doesn’t exist in Chinese (L1). Zero Contrast may affect IL development in subtle ways. One effect involves the addition of a preliminary step to an acquisition sequence. Thus, when my students were in the process of the acquisition of English definite articles, they initially employed deictic determiners, usually demonstrative adjectives, as an approximation to definite articles in English.

        But, if we compare the degree of difficulty in the acquisition of these two lexical categories, it is obvious that the learning of definite article is higher in difficulty degree than that of indefinite. This may also prove the prediction (b) of MDH because definite article is more marked in linguistic feature than indefinite article for Chinese students, thus more difficult.

2.2.Passive

        My students no only represent difficulties in lexical learning but also show more difficulties in syntactic learning of English. Among the many syntactic structures, which they find difficult, is the passive structure.

        The term passive in Mandarin is generally applied to sentences containing the coverb “Bei”. The Bei construction contains a logical object that occurs in the initial position. As in English, there is evidence that the logical object is preposed to subject position in the Bei construction. Thus, just as the English passive, the logical object NP of the Chinese Bei construction moves to subject position.

 E.g.          (1)                      了。

                       he   by    me    cheat    ASP

                       He   was cheated by me.

                  (2)         自己的     朋友          了。            

                                    he     by      self’s     friend   hurt   ASP

                                    He was hurt by self’s (his own) friend.

         The second similarity between English and Chinese passive structures is that the subject position of a passive sentence cannot be null. An NP must move into this position:

                                (3)   a.  e                   他。        

                                              by man  cheat  ASP    him

b.      e was cheated Mary by him.

The Bei construction in Chinese is thus very much like its English counterpart. Both involve obligatory movement of an object NP to subject position.

        As many theorists have argued in L2 acquisition, the role of L1 on the L2 acquisition may be a complex one. According to Zobl (1982): when the L1 and the L2 have the same way to represent a linguistic feature, target-like control of the L2 learner is achieved more quickly than in cases of zero contrast (i.g. the L2 possess a category that is absent in the learner L1). When English and Chinese share similarity in passive structure, the learner is more likely to grasp the English passive structure quicker at the initial stages of learning. That my students usually have a very clear understanding of how English passive is structured may be attributed to the positive effect of L1.

        But things are not always satisfactory. When they learn some more complicated passive structures, the students complained about more difficulties and confusion. According to Zobl (1982), zero contrast may affect interlanguage development in two ways. One effect is to delay passage through developmental sequence. And the second one involves the addition of a preliminary step to an acquisition sequence. When we observe the two languages more closely, we may find that the Bei construction differs from the English passive structure in certain ways. Morphologically, the verb form in the Bei construction undergoes no changes, as can be seen in sentences (1) to (2), to verb in English. Even if “Bei” can be regarded as the passive morpheme, when it immediately precedes the verb, it would still differ from “–en” in English in that it does not absorb the case-assigning feature of the verb. This can be indicated by the fact that the logical object of a verb can still occur in post verbal position as in (4)

(4)    a.  他的 父亲       土匪        了。

            his    father  by   bandit  kill  ASP.

                                   His  father was killed by the bandit.

b.           土匪             父亲。

                                   he   by   bandit  kill  ASP   father.

                                   He was killed father by the bandit.

        Another difference is that in English a passive verb cannot assign case and hence NP-movement is forced. In Chinese, however, the verb in the bei construction retains its case-assigning.

(5)                             三次。

he     by  me cheat   ASP    three times

He was cheated for three times by me.

        In this comparison, we may see that there exists some linguistic feature in English which Chinese doesn’t keep congruent. The fact that Chinese doesn’t allow any inflectional changes to the verb preceded by Bei is a proof of zero contrast, which would cause the students to persist with their L1 linguistic feature for a long time before they finally attain the target-like use of the verb in English. So the students are delayed in their passage through the acquisition of English passive structure. The errors are frequently found among the students. They usually didn’t use the proper inflected forms of verb to refer to a passive meaning.

         Furthermore, Chinese can even express a passive meaning without the Bei structure.

(6)    a.  这本     杂志        出版      了。

b.   this   magazine   publish  ASP.

c.       This magazine was published.

 

 I usually find students make such sentences like (b) in their initial stage of study on passive structure. This is also a proof to show that students persist with their L1 form in the development of interlanguage longer that expected. Thus, more difficulties are confronted with them.

        We can clearly see from the discussion above that the effect of L1 on the acquisition of L2 may be a complex one, negative or positive. And the degree of difficulty for L2 learners in the acquisition of target language is attributed to complicated factors.

 

3. Solution to the Problems

         From the study of Zisa project, Pienemann (1984) made analysis on the distinction between developmental and variational sequences, which lay a solid basis for the Multi-dimensional Model (Pienemann & Johnston, 1987) in SLA theories. A major feature of the theory is known as the Teachability Hypothesis. In this section, I’ll try to discuss on the possibilities for my students to successfully attain acquisition of the two linguistic items covered in the previous section. The whole discussion will be constructed on the basis of Teachability Hypothesis theory.

        Zisa group’s Multi-dimensional Model considered SLA as a cognitive process, which is subject to developmental sequences and constrained by variational strategies. The developmental sequences were observed from a study on the GSL (German as Second Language) word-order data, but they were claimed by Pienemann to be generalized to other developmental sequences and to other languages. In English, the developmental sequences can be illustrated as in the following

           Stage X:        SVO?

                                 not X

                                 SVO

          Stage X +1:    ADV-FRONTING

                                 DO-FRONTING

                                 WH-FRONTING

          Stage X+2:    YES/NO INVERSION

                                COMPLEMENTIZER INVERSION

                                PARTICLE SEPARATION

          Stage X+3     AUX. SECOND, with agreement

                              “DO” SECOND, with agreement

                                REFLECTIVE PRONOUN

                                DATIVE “to”

                                3 RD SINGULAR “-s”

          Stage X+4     CAUSATIVE

                                ADVERB VP

                                QUESTION TAG, with agreement.

                                  (Pienemaan & Johnston, 1987)

        And in the processing, three strategies are usually applied by the learners: (1) Canonical Order strategy (2) Initialisation/Finalization strategy (3) Subordinate Clause strategy. According to Pienemann, the Teachability Hypothesis (Pienemann, 1984) predicts that

           “ The teachability of an item, and indeed the effects of any external factors, such as natural exposure to a target structure, will always be constrained by its learnability in this way. In other words, since the underlying speech-processing prerequisites constitute an implicational hierarchy, the devices at one stage being part of what is required for operations at the next stage, none of the abstract stages of processing complexity can be bypassed. Items will only be successfully taught when learners are psycholinguistic ally ready ‘ to learn them’.”

(Larsen-Freeman & Michael H.Long, 1991).

        In this way, the processing prerequisites required for certain linguistic items concern the reordering of underlying linguistic units. Structures from stage X+2 cannot be processed by the learners of stage X without prior learning of X+1, since a necessary prerequisite would be missing in the learner’s interlanguage specific-processing mechanism. So, an L2 structure can be learnt from instruction only if the learner’s interlanguage is close to the point when this structure is acquired in the natural setting (so that sufficient processing prerequisites are developed). So far as the developmental sequence is concerned, learners have to be “ready” for the new rule, that is to say, at a stage when all the necessary preceding rules are already in place.

3.1. Articles

        In our discussion, articles are hard to learn. Rules for their use often depend on a variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors pertaining to their associated noun referent. Such factors include the referent’s first or second mention in the discourse and its degree of representativeness, visibility, or familiarity to speaker and listener. Although specific study and detailed data are needed to decide on the stages of development for my students, the difficulties they have frequently reported and errors they usually made clearly show that they have skipped a developmental stage while they are still not ready in linguistic prerequisites. In other words, English article as a linguistic item is not learnable for them at the present stage, thus unreachable accordingly.

        Furthermore, for highly complex items such as article, instruction appears to have little impact as learners follow naturalistic processes and sequences which appear to be unrelated to the ways in which articles are taught in classrooms or presented in the textbooks. In spite of the fact that classroom learners like my students are given rules for processing and producing articles, they appear to follow natural processes identified in untutored second language acquisition. In terms of syllabus design, this suggests that the forms and functions of complex morphology may be excluded from specific rule presentation to the learners. It’s a fact that articles have been identified as a frequently occurring feature of both naturalistic input and teacher speech to students of English as a L2.This suggests that they may be omitted from explicit presentation in the teaching syllabus and left to their inevitable inclusion in the teachers’ communication to the learners. When the students develop into a stage on which they are ready for all the necessary preceding rules in place, learnability will be no problem and we can expect the students to attain target use of English articles successfully and effortlessly.

3.2. Passive

        According to the developmental stages in ESL presented by Pienemann, my students can be ranked into Stage X+1 as they have just established the grammatical rules over the formation of V-ed. English passive structure involves the linguistic knowledge on how to form auxiliary (be /have) +-ed, which belongs to Stage X+2. As the processing prerequisites for structures of StageX+2 are also the prerequisites for Stage X+1, the students are expected to be in the position to process the structures of StageX+2, the passive structure here in our discussion. So the students should be expected to automatically develop to StageX+2 and successfully attain target-like use of passive structure. According to Teachability Hypothesis, the students are psycholinguistically “ready” to learn the item. The item is learnable because learners didn’t skip the developmental sequence. Accordingly, the students will successfully acquire the passive structure.

        However, even when they follow the proper developmental sequence, I still find many difficulties on the part of students in their learning. Actually, all instances of language acquisition are subject to the same processing constraints, i.g. developmental sequences. Second language acquisition is also constrained by variational features, which were claimed by Pienemann as another dimension in the Multi-dimensional Model. The relative degree of difficulty may be attributed to the different strategies applied by the students in their acquisition behaviour.

        In the previous section, we have discussed about the similarities between the two languages. But similarities do not appear to facilitate acquisition of complex structures. Learners seemed to be dealing directly with the L2 without mediation of the L1 (Cooper et al. 1979). So the general difficulties posed by English passive structure is compounded in the case of Chinese learners by the existence of superficially similar but structurally distinct L1 construction. Actually, the complexity of interlanguage syntax exists in the second language acquisition. And the interaction of L1 and L2 constructions and universal factors lead to the over-generalization in the interlanguage grammar. The over-generalization poses a serious learnable problem, which is proved by the longer persistence of the learners on passive structure than expected.

        The Teachability Hypothesis predicts that instruction can only promote language acquisition if the interlanguage is close to the point when the structure to be taught is acquired in the natural setting. Teaching may affect the variation features or may speed up the learners’ progress through developmental stages but not change them. Or instruction has an accelerating effect on acquisition for learners who are ready for it. In this case, my students are just in the proper order to prove that English passive structure is learnable for them. The frustrating effect of difficulty upon them would be diminishing so long as they develop along the continuum of sequence. Meanwhile, the processing strategies applied by them will also be improved through formal instruction.

        To sum up, I think teaching or formal instruction can effectively help the learners to prepare all the necessary linguistic prerequisites before they develop to a higher stage on which they can more successfully grasp target language. Developmental sequence is a linguistic reality for all second language learners, which can never be skipped.

 

4. English Content Words and Idiomatic Expressions

        In the final part of this paper, I will focus on the learning of English content words and idiomatic expressions by comparing linguistic differences between English and Chinese. Discussion will also be given to whether linguistic knowledge of Chinese may or not benefit the students in their learning of these two lexical items.

        Generally, the lexical categories have been divided into content words and function words in English. And Chinese morphemes are divided into “full words” having semantic content and “empty words”, which are grammatical markers without substantive meaning. Chinese full and empty words, according to grammarians, do not map into English content words and function words. Otherwise, some striking differences have been found on content words between the two languages: (1) Chinese words generally have no grammatical inflections to indicate case, gender, tense or degree, while English words are usually inflected to bear certain grammatical functions; (2) English content words have more meaning per unit than Chinese, actually the amount of meaning generally associated with a single English content word is often spread over several Chinese words;(3) English words generally have a fairly well-defined meaning associated with a particular orthographic representation. But Chinese character is highly variable and content-dependent. Chinese content words have multiple meanings, many serving as noun, verb, adjective or adverb;(4) English content words are sometimes more abstract and occur less frequently, while Chinese lacks the word for an abstraction, which is usually realized with the help of combination of characters.

        In their discussion on the impact of language differences on language processing, Aaronson and Ferres claimed that the differences between the two languages might lead the bilingual learners to process English words differently. In the light of this claim, I will discuss in detail about how learning of English content words for my students will be affected by their L1: Chinese.

4.1. Content Words

4.1.1 Nouns

        Both English and Chinese nouns refer to a substantive entity or an abstract concept. In most cases, learners can find a noun in Chinese to its English equivalent. In this respect, learners are usually found to benefit from their native language. But some linguistic differences can also bring difficulty to the learners and even interfere their acquisition if they borrow the concept from their native language. One striking linguistic feature of English nouns is that they are inflected to indicate number. Thus, English has singular and plural forms while Chinese nouns themselves cannot represent number without the help of other linguistic ways.

                         (7)                                 pig/pigs

                                                               house/houses

        Furthermore, the certain forms of nouns must be in agreement with a verb when it’s used as a subject in a sentence, but Chinese doesn’t require such agreement.

                         (8)          狗在叫。            A dog is barking.

                                                                    Dogs are barking.

So, problems emerge when Chinese learners borrow from native language grammar to second language acquisition.

        Another feature, which Chinese doesn’t have, is that Chinese nouns don’t have the functions to nominalize a verbal action because Chinese doesn’t have very clear classification of lexical categories. Thus, students usually have much difficulty in comprehension of English nominalization. It’s very difficult for Chinese learners to understand and impossible to produce such sentence as: “The approval of that measure by congress.”.  They would rather say: “That measure will be approved by congress.”

4.1.2 Verbs

        English verbs are different from Chinese in more ways related to its inflectional changes and grammatical functions, which can indicate number, voice, mood etc.

Chinese verbs usually don’t have the inflectional changes to the characters. When Chinese learners study English verbs, they are unable to recognize the inflected endings of English verbs, thus resulting in erroneous sentence as

                          (9)   He love me.

        Secondly, Chinese verbs usually don’t have internal properties to refer to the tense while English verbs are defined and restricted to certain forms, indicating various state of actions being conducted. Chinese may only refer to the tense by putting adverbs into a sentence. Compare the following

                          (10)  天在下雨.                         It is raining.

                                  昨天下雨.                      It rained yesterday.

        Differences can also be found on passive forms of English verb. As has been discussed in the previous pages, Chinese passive structure is typically represented by a fixed construction with verbs preceded by “” “” “” “”etc. These markers function very much the same way as “by” phrases which introduce the doer of an action. At this stage, Chinese can benefit the students in the acquisition of English passive structures as they can lend the concept of Chinese passive into the typical English equivalents.

        However, Chinese has another way to express passive meaning without the markers mentioned above. This feature will not benefit the learners .On the contrary, it may inhibit the learners from correct understanding and lead them to errors.

                          (11)  票买了.                                The ticket has been bought.

                                盘子 洗过了.                  The plates have been washed.

       

        Another feature of English is that it contains a large number of verbal phrases, which allow the separation of the verb and it’s adverbial modifiers. But Chinese doesn’t have equivalents. In fact, verbal phrases are very hard to handle for Chinese learners, as they usually don’t know how to properly allocate the prepositions and adverbs within the string.

4.1.3 Adjectives and Adverbs

        I would like to put adjectives and adverbs under one discussion because I think they share some identical features in contrast to Chinese. English adverbs and adjectives involve degrees of comparison. When making comparison, English adjectives and adverbs must be designated into proper forms with inflectional changes to the endings. In Chinese, typical constructions like “” are applied for comparison regardless of any changes in the adjectives or adverbs themselves. This is also a linguistic item in English, which requires more complex processing strategies for Chinese learners to attain target use, thus more difficult.

4.2.Idiomatic Expressions

        One of the most difficult items in the acquisition of English lexis is idiomatic expression. Idiomatic expression is a fixed form, which has been developed over a long time and established to connote specific meaning within certain contexts. Both English and Chinese language contain many idiomatic expressions, some of which are analogous both in meaning and use while some of which are markedly different. Accordingly, similarity may bring benefits to the Chinese students, but dissimilarity may cause great problems to them as well. These features of English idiomatic expressions will be discussed in the following pages.

4.2.1. Paired Idiomatic Expressions

        There are, in English, some idiomatic expressions, which completely match the Chinese equivalents both in semantic meaning and linguistic forms. This will greatly help the students to grasp the meaning and use of English idiomatic expressions as they can go directly for help from their L1. In this case, L1 benefits L2 learners.

                           (12)  To fish in troubled waters.                    浑水摸鱼

      To be on the ice.                                        薄冰

      Walls have ears.                                        隔墙有耳

4.2.2.Partially Paired Idiomatic Expressions

        Some English idiomatic expressions are quite similar in form and meaning to their Chinese equivalents with limited changes in some images. Some images in English version turn out to be represented by other images in the Chinese version, which resemble to the English. But the Chinese version of images usually doesn’t change the meaning of the idioms as a whole. In these cases, Chinese equivalents can do great help to enable the learners attain target use of English idioms. When they benefit from L1, L2 learners’ passage through cognitive process will be shortened to result in quicker learning.

                          (13)   To laugh off one’s head.                           笑掉大牙

                                    To shed crocodile’s tears.                         猫哭老鼠

                                    To spend money like water.                      挥金如土

4.2.3.Marked Differentiated Idiomatic Expressions

        Great number of English idiomatic expressions is specified to their native contextual surroundings and cannot find equivalents in Chinese. These idioms are context dependent, thus need more sophisticated psychological and sociolinguistic competence on the learners of L2. Or they will be incomprehensible.  For example, the learners can only properly understand “To carry coals to Newcastle.” when they know where “Newcastle” is and that it is rich in coals. So, in Chinese, it means “多此一举”. More examples are in the following

(12)           Cat’s  paws                                                上当

                                    A wet blanket                                             令人扫兴之人

      Like a fish out of water                               不自在

      Be born with a silver spoon in mouth         生在富贵之家

 

        To finish the discussion, we may find that learning of English content words and idiomatic expressions will be a complex and difficult task for Chinese learners. In this respect, L1 may positively speed up acquisition, but may also frustratingly interfere the acquisition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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