Unlearning Of Topic-prominence By Chinese Learners Of English:A Discourse Perspective

In terms of the language typology,English and Chinese belong to two different language types as English is a subject-prominent language while Chinese falls into the category of topic-prominent language.Based on this classification and the distinctions between English and Chinese,numerous studies have investigated Chinese learners’ acquisition of English in the field of second language acquisition and there are mainly two trends.Some scholars posit that the development of interlanguage would not be influenced by leaners’ first language while others hold the opposite view.Additionally,most previous studies were conducted within the scope of syntax by employing the grammatical judgment test.The present study aims to move one step forward on the basis of previous syntactic studies and sets out to investigate the features of unlearning topic-prominent constructions among Chinese second language learners of English from the discourse perspective.This article firstly analyzes the differences between topic-prominent languages and subject-prominent languages.Then,it presents a more comprehensive way of classifying topic-comment constructions,which are classified into 2 broad types and 8 sub-types.A spontaneous oral interpretation task and a careful written translation task were adopted in the present study.The content of two tasks was identical,which aimed to elicit the interlanguage data in terms of Tarone’s Vernacular Style and Careful Style(Tarone,1983:1953).Each task included 40 Chinese sentences in discourse covering the aforementioned 8 subtypes of topic-comment constructions.More than 150 Chinese EFL learners participated in the study,and 80 of them were selected as eligible representing two levels of English proficiency: the intermediate and advanced level.Three significant findings were yielded from the present study by using SPSS.First,Chinese L2 English learners have generally acquired the knowledge that English does not allow topic-comment constructions.That is to say,they have unlearned Chinese topic-prominent features.Second,task-types(the spontaneous oral translation,the careful written translation),English language proficiency of Chinese L2 English learners’(advanced level,intermediate level),and sentence types(8 subtypes)all affect the EFL learners’ production of interlanguage singly and altogether.Findings of the present study may contribute to a better and more comprehensive understanding of the unlearning of topic-prominence by Chinese EFL learners.It also helps to facilitate a more effective and efficient way of the second language teaching.