L2 Acquisition Of English Verbal Aspect By Chinese Senior High School Students

This thesis is an attempt to explore the verbal aspect acquisition in Chinese senior high school.According to Smith(1997),verbal aspect could be divided into situation aspect and viewpoint aspect.Three semantic features(Dynamism,Telicity and Durality)classify five situation types,namely,Statives,Accomplishments,Activities,Achievements and Semelfactives(the last one will be not covered in this thesis),and verbs with different inherent semantic meanings exhibit varying degrees of compatibility with viewpoints.Based on this Two-component Theory,this study specifically examines the influence of semantic features on L2 verbal acquisition among the Chinese high school learners and hopefully to find the problems that the learners are faced with from the perspective of situation aspect so as to give some feasible solutions in the process of vocabulary acquisition.On the basis of the framework of Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis and Aspect Hypothesis,this study intends to answer the following three research questions,that is,whether the Chinese senior high school students could differentiate the three temporal properties of English verbs,Dynamism,Telicity and Durality respectively.We designed Grammaticality Judgment Test and Translation Test here to carry out the study.120 senior high school students in Jiujiang,Jiangxi Province together with 4 English-speaking controls participated in the investigation.Apart from the 4 native speakers,56 were in the first grade and 64 were graduating students.Participants were required to judge the grammatical acceptability degree of 50 English sentences based on the 5-Likert Scale and translate 24 Chinese sentences into English within one hour.The statistical results support the hypotheses proposed in the study,that is,Chinese senior high school students could distinguish the Dynamism feature and Telicity feature basically,but they are not really sensitive to the Durality feature.It is believed that Chinese senior high school students are influenced by Chinese thinking pattern in the acquisition of English verbal aspect,and the linguistic polysemy also plays a role in the process.This empirical research has some pedagogical implications.Since it reveals the problems existing in the English verbal aspect acquisition by Chinese senior high school learners and possible causes for the problems,it contributes to the effective verbal acquisition among Chinese senior high school students.