Early Stages Of Temporal Development In Chinese English Interlanguage

The expression of temporality is essential in all natural languages and it has been extensively studied over the centuries. Temporality is an important issue in language teaching and learning both in first and second language acquisition. Abundant investigations have been made on the acquisitional process in interlanguage temporality in an attempt to get a better understanding of the this process and ultimately to facilitate language teaching and learning.The present study sets out to investigate how low level Chinese EFL learners acquire the English temporal system. The focus of concern is the two major linguistic constraints on the simple past marking, phonetic saliency and lexical aspect. These two linguistic constraints allow us to look at the temporal acquisition from two important perspectives: how the simple past marking is influenced respectively by the surface features of the past inflectional form, and the semantic meaning of the predicate.The research hypotheses were made to testify respectively the constraints of phonetic saliency and lexical aspect on the simple past marking. Specifically, the learners' simple past marking follows respectively the Principle of Saliency and the Aspect Hypothesis and, furthermore, along with the development of the learners' proficiency in the simple past marking, the influence of the two constraints will decrease in force.The participants of this study were low proficiency Chinese EFL learners, Senior One students in their first month of study. These are the lowest level learners ever sampled from in temporal studies in mainland China. It is expected that studies of early stages of temporal development can reveal more clearly the problems in the acquisitional process. The data were elicited by a written retell task of a silent film. As many as 129 compositions were collected.To ensure that the data to be used in the present study could well represent the sampled group, the collected data were selected by normal distribution (X±1.96S): firstly the compositions were selected by length of writing and then respectively by accurate and appropriate use of the simple past morphology based on classifications of saliency features and lexical aspect. The selected data were then tested for possible bias of gender and learning experience. The results demonstrated that the data were not affected by these two factors and could be used in the analysis.The research design of the present study was a combination of a descriptive study of the overall data and a cross-sectional study of the grouped data based on accuracy and appropriacy rate for the simple past marking. The overall descriptive study supplied a general view of the distributional patterns across the constraining categories. In the cross-sectional study, the distributional patterns of each of the five proficiency groups were displayed and comparisons across the groups revealed the developmental trend of the distribution of the constraining categories.Results from the type analysis as well as those from the token analysis were taken into consideration as a helpful supplement to ensure the validity of the results in the study. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were made in order to provide a statistically well supported as well as a more convincing description of the acquisitional process.The results of the study showed that both linguistic constraints under investigation have systematically affected the simple past marking in this corpus. On the one hand, the learners were more likely to mark more salient past forms, supporting the Principle of Saliency: Specifically, irregular past was more accurately marked than regular past; suppletives were more accurately marked than other irregular past variants; and the regular non-syllabics were more accurately marked than the regular syllabics. On the other hand, the learners favoured achievements and accomplishments over activities and statives, supporting the Aspect Hypothesis. Moreover, both constraints were found to have a stronger influence on the less proficient learners and the influence decreased in force as the learners became more competent in the simple past marking. These results were supported by both token and type analyses. Lexical aspect was found to be a more forceful constraint on the simple past marking than phonetic saliency: Among the more advanced learners, the distinctions across the four lexical aspectual categories in the simple past marking were still statistically significant while the distinctions across the categories of saliency features were only significant in the lower level groups. This means that the learners were more sensitive to meaning rather than form.In the present study, the participants exhibited quite a high level of temporal development compared with their overall language proficiency. Some non-linguistic factors were found to have come into play on this point. Such factors as the influence of the cognitive effort exerted on the acquisition, the common teaching methods, classroom instructions, and the resulting learning strategies may affect and facilitate the process of temporal acquisition.The findings of the present study of the linguistic constraints on the simple past marking have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. They have revealed some of the existing problems of temporal acquisition, especially those pertaining to early stages of EFL learning in the Chinese context, and they are helpful in seeking for effective solutions to these problems. Moreover, the research methods as well as the findings of the study have contributed to the study of L2 tense-aspect acquisition and hopefully can benefit and facilitate future studies in the area.