A Corpus-based Study Of The Acquisition Of English Passive Structure By Chinese College Students

The passive concept is a significant component of human empirical life, thus the application of passive structure in English has long been the hot topic of linguists from various linguistic schools. Traditional grammarians tend to regard the passive structure as a derivative of the active structure, and they mainly focus on the study of grammatical structure of English passives. Cognitive linguists, however, pay much attention to the research of prototype structure of passive voice, as well as its semantic and syntactic features. Most functionalists devote themselves into the exploration of the interpersonal and textual functions of passive structure. Apart from these, there are also studies concerning EFL learners’ acquisition of English passives. These studies mainly put great emphasis on EFL learners’ misuse of English passive structure, especially the EFL learners’ over-passivization of unaccusative verbs. But as a whole, the previous studies are mostly theoretical researches, and empirical researches are still inadequate. Besides, the studies on EFL learners’ acquisition of English passive structure mainly examine the errors committed by learners, but seldom involve relevant teaching strategies.Based on the CLEC and NESSIE corpus, this paper probes deep into the Chinese college students’ application of English passive structure in their CET4 and CET6 writings, and compares the similarities and differences between their performances with that of native speakers, and also expounds the major four categories of errors in Chinese college students’ application of English passive structure. The causes of these errors are various, and language transfer is one of the key factors in the students’ application of English passive structure. Therefore, adopting the contrastive analysis and overlooking the influence of other factors, this paper tries to examine the influence of language transfer from Chinese in the students’ application of English passive structure and propose some teaching strategies of English passive structure based on Rod Ellis’ weak interface theory.This thesis is composed of six chapters: chapter one mainly introduces the research background, research questions, research methodology and significance of this study; chapter two briefly reviews previous studies of English passive structure; chapter three is the corpus-based study of Chinese college students’ application of English passive structure through CLEC and NESSIE corpus; chapter four deeply analyzes the causes of the results in chapter three basing on contrastive analysis hypothesis; chapter five takes the weak interface theory of Rod Ellis as the theoretical foundation, and puts forward some teaching strategies of English passive structure; chapter six summarizes the conclusions of this paper, and points out the limitations of this research and suggestions for further studies.