Authentic Materials Input In The Target Language For Chinese Young Learners Of English

Rapid development of science and technology has made a close connection between countries. People from different countries communicate more and more frequently. English, as an international language, plays an irreplaceable role in our communication, so English acquisition, especially oral English acquisition, is a key to the improvement of our communicative competence. However, the current situations of teenagers acquiring English in China are not so optimistic; for instance, most English learners tend to express themselves in a bookish way or tend to concern about whether their expressions are grammatical or not during the communication. These problems, to a great extent, can be attributed to lack of enough exposure to the authentic language environment. The chances of exposure to that kind of environment are restricted to language classroom. Therefore, in the process of language acquisition, teachers need to choose the optimum materials to provide students good exposure to the authentic language environment. Teaching materials, as an embodiment of teaching program, has its own value of existence. But the teaching materials or the textbooks offered to students are often edited before, which results in the loss of completeness, richness and authenticity of the materials. Then to deal with that problem, other factors closely related to teaching and learning should be considered in this kind of research.However, previous studies mainly focus on the study of the teaching methods or strategies, affective factors and testing, etc.. Different from previous studies, this thesis tries to study the input materials in and outside the language classroom setting based on the theoretical framework of the authentic materials concept and the Stephen D Krashen's affective filter hypothesis, so as to justify the rationality of supplementing authentic materials like young adult literature to the teaching materials to make up the loss of completeness, richness, authenticity and interestingness.The author first uses TRADOS Translator's Workbench to build a English-Chinese bilingual parallel corpus with the young adult novel The Lightning Thief and the senior high school English textbooks as input materials; next, the author uses ICTCLAS2015 and CLAWS respectively to carry out word segmentation and POS tagging of Chinese and English corpus; and then, with the aid of Wordsmith Tools 5.0, the author obtains the related data to support this study. By analyzing the data from the two corpora The Lightning Thief and senior high school English textbooks on the lexical and syntactic level, the author finds out that the former has a richer vocabulary and larger information loads but more simple sentences.Then based on the data analysis and literature and theoretical support, the author validates the feasibility of exposing authentic materials to the senior high school students, claims the possibility of using authentic materials in and outside the senior high school language classroom, explains the effects of authentic young adult literature on lowering affective filters of language learners, and summaries a series of advantages of authentic young adult literature over the textbooks in acquiring the foreign and second language, such as high motivation, diversified vocabulary knowledge, critical thinking, etc. Finally, the author draws a conclusion that authentic materials like young adult novels can work as supplementary materials to senior high school textbooks to provide language learners with more authentic, more complete, more interesting and richer language input. In a word, this study provides a new view in language teaching and learning research, which is expected to provide some teaching implications for language teachers and researchers.