The Effect Of The Learning Of Order Of Information Sequencing In English Adverbial Clauses Of Reason On The Use Of Chinese Adverbial Clauses Of Reason

Many scholars have studied various effects that the mother tongue (L1) has brought on the second language acquisition (SLA) and these scholars have gained fruitful results. No matter what methodologies they have adopted to analyze the effects of the L1 on SLA, such as contrastive analysis, error analysis, interlanguage and so on, they have proved that L1 plays an important role in the SLA. Recently, they have begun to realize the learning of second language (L2) or more languages has similar effects on the L1, and they call such effects as reverse transfer or backward transfer. This paper aims to study the following questions: in learners'L1 environment, whether their way of expression of the adverbial clauses of reason of L1 is affected by the way of the expression of the adverbial clauses of reason of L2; the second question is that whether there is relationship between the second language proficiency and the occurrence of backward transfer in the syntax and discourse tasks, respectively; the last research question is what the relationship is like.This research adopted the quantitative method and used the research questionnaire as a tool. The subjects are classified into five groups. The first group is non-English majors. The subjects of the second, the third and the fourth groups are all English majors. The subjects of G 2 are first year students. Those of G 3 are juniors. Those of G 4 are first-year postgraduates. The last group is the baseline group of Chinese monolinguals. For the Chinese first-year students, whether they are English majors or not, the English course is one of their compulsory course during their junior and senor high school study and most of the English majors chose their major out of their own will, so no matter in class or after class, they have spent much time in studying English. When those first-year students entered the university, they will continue the English study and for the English majors, they will spend more time in studying English due to their major. So their English proficiency must reach a certain level. The juniors of G 3 have further studied English for two years so their English proficiency has been improved a lot. The first-year students of the postgraduates of G 4 can speak English fluently and appropriately after four years'study. The research questionnaire includes two tasks: one is to choose the appropriate conjunctives to connect the two clauses, which is the syntax task that is SLT. And the other one is to write a composition according to a series of six pictures, which is the discourse task that is WT. The research questionnaire was revised from the previous researcher'according to a pilot test. In the syntax task, the subjects are required to choose the proper conjunctive from a group of 11 conjunctives to connect a pair of two independent sentences into one complete sentence. There are twenty pairs and eight of them are used as interference pairs. In the discourse task, the subjects are required to describe why the accident happened according to a series of six pictures and also asked them to use the adverbial conjunctive of reason at least once in one picture. The two tasks aim to study the distribution and frequency of adverbial clauses used by the subjects. In this research, 46 research questionnaires were collected from the non-English majors of G 1 and 34 eligible cases, 78 research questionnaires were collected from the freshmen and 60 eligible cases; 75 from juniors and 44 eligible cases; 60 from the first year of the postgraduates and 40 eligible cases and 7 baseline questionnaires. In this research, the Excel and SPSS 17.0 were chosen to analyze the data.The author analyzed and discussed the data in the theoretical framework, but the result has not completely proved the original hypotheses. The data of this research can only prove that the occurrence of backward transfer is not obvious for the Chinese first-year students and juniors in the L1 environment, while the backward transfer does occur to the first-year postgraduates in the first language environment and also there is the relationship between the second language users'English proficiency levels and the occurrence of it in the SLT.Finally, this paper concludes the research result and summarizes the reason why the results of this research are different from those of the previous similar studies. Moreover, it provides the general findings of this study. Furthermore, this paper states the significance of the study. Meanwhile, the author analyzed the limitation of this research and hopes it will give some implications for the further study.