A Study On Chinese University Students’ Acquisition Of English Middle Constructions

Middle constructions,with active syntactical form illustrating passive meaning,are one of the difficult points for Chinese university students when learning English.The thesis reveals Chinese university students’ acquisition of English middle constructions within the framework of Construction Grammar by adopting questionnaire and tests.Specifically,the thesis explores the following questions: 1)How well do Chinese university students acquire different types of English middle constructions? 2)How well do Chinese university students acquire the semantic constraints? 3)How do the Chinese university students judge the grammaticality of English middle constructions? 4)How does the first language influence university students in acquiring English middle constructions?284 questionnaires are sent to volunteers from six universities in Nanjing.The questionnaire includes three tasks: questions-answering task,acceptability-judgment task and translation task.According to the research objective,the research finally selects 180 valid papers and divides the subjects into high,intermediate and low groups according to their scores in CET 4 and CET 6,and SPSS 20.0 and Excel are adopted to analyze their acquisition of English middle constructions.The research results show that: 1)In identification and production of English middle constructions,the acquisition orders are almost the same despite slight differences.Instrument and patient middle constructions are easier to acquire.Material and location middle constructions are more difficult.The experiencer constructions are the most difficult for all the students and there is no correlation between their performance and proficiency.2)Chinese university students have difficulty in acquiring the semantic constraints.The high group performs the best while the intermediate and low groups perform worse.In terms of semantic constraints,including those on verb,subject,adverbial and implicit agent,the three groups have difficulty in constraints on subject and implicit agent and they fail to make right attributions.3)Most Chinese university students tend to judge the grammaticality of English middle constructions by traditional grammar.However,the number of advanced students who prefer to judge the grammaticality by the whole construction is higher than those in the low and intermediate groups.4)Chinese students are affected by their mother tongue in the acquisition of English middle constructions.When judging ungrammatical constructions,students with higher proficiency are more likely to overcome the negative effects from Chinese middle constructions.However,the three groups are negatively affected by their mother tongue to the same degree in translation task.The thesis is limited in the range of sample selection and lacks in-depth analysis in finding out students’ reasons for judging grammaticality,but the findings are still of great pedagogical importance.