Chinese-speaking Learners' Acquisition Of English Adverbial Clauses

Salience, defined as the frequency or availability of L2 input (Bardovi-Harlig,1987), was regarded as a factor that affects the acquisition of L2 linguistic features. But it is argued here that the learner's consciousness of the input should be considered together with the availability of the input. Thus, this research investigated the effects of consciousness and input frequency in the teaching of 6 types of English adverbial clause to Chinese-speaking college students, with a teaching experiment.2 classes of the same grade participated in this teaching experiment. At the beginning, a test of the level of CET 3 was given to the 2 classes of first-year college students who were non-English majors, which included test items examining those 6 types of adverbial clause.The results of the students in response to those items concerning the 6 language points were used to select subjects from the experimental class and the control class to form the Experimental Group and the Control Group respectively:40 subjects for each group.Students in the experimental class were taught the 6 types of English adverbial clause with some grammar awareness-raising activities such as underlining the target clauses, making sentences of the clauses, etc.Meanwhile, the control class was taught the same content in a normal way, without any awareness-raising activities.The 6 types of adverbial clause were the teaching focus in the teaching experiment. These clauses appeared in the course book—either in the texts or the exercises—or in the teacher's ppt files. The frequencies of those language points were controlled to form two categories of language points:High-Frequency points and Low-Frequency points. Among the 6 types of clauses, 3 were manipulated and designed as the high-frequency clauses, and the other three were low-frequency clauses.At the end of the experiment, a posttest of the level of CET 3 was given to the two classes of students, but only the scores of the 80 subjects were given to statistic analyses. The results showed that the awareness-raising presentation approach was significantly more effective than the normal presentation approach in teaching those English adverbial clauses to Chinese college students,but there was no significant difference between high frequency level and low frequent level clauses.That is to say, consciousness affects the acquisition of L2 linguistic features more than input frequency in some cases.The findings of this study have some pedagogical implications for English class in China. They suggested that consciousness-raising activities should be applied to college English teaching in China. In addition, although the role of input frequency in second language learning was reported in some studies in the literature, the learner's own attention to the input is even more crucial for learning.