A Comparative Study Of Children's Pro-drop Parameter Setting Between Two English-language Educational Models

The education of English as an international language has attracted considerable attention and has been in an upsurge in kindergartens nowadays. But lacking the research of second language acquisition theory and theory of second language teaching, the kindergarten' s English-language education is mainly based on experience, and therefore the outcomes of English-language education is not so effective.There are many aspects of variables influencing English-language achievements. Among them, educational model is one of the most important factors.As for English-language educational model, there are two kinds of approaches existing in kindergartens today. One is the traditional model 梚nstruction. It' s the explicit teaching of English-language and children are learning English in a conscious way. English is taught as a subject in kindergartens and is not commonly used as a medium of communication. And also there is another innovative approach梚mmersion, where English is functioned as the medium of education. Children are immerged partially or fully in English-language environment and educated through the medium of English. The latter model provides natural conditions and employs techniques that encourage more intuitive absorption to develop acquisition and subconscious processes.How to evaluate these two different models of English-language education? There are various angles to examine the effect of English- language education.It has been widely accepted today that linguistics and language education are closely related. In the field of modern second language education, it is unanimously agreed that second language education used, above anything else, linguistics. Chomsky has dominated the field of linguistics since 1960s. UG is the most recent and best-known linguistic theory. From 1980s, there has been a considerable revival of interest in Chomskyan linguistic theory as a source of hypotheses about second language acquisition. Therefore, we will account for children' s English-language education from a UG perspective.Within the framework of UG, there are principles that are subject to parametric variation. The implication of the concept of parametric variation has in some respects been more fully developed for second language acquisition than for first. A much- quoted example is the pro-drop parameter. Pro-drop parameter concerns whether a language has declarative sentences without apparent subjects, known as null-subject sentences, hence it is also often known as the null subject parameter. It has a direct effect on the construction specific to the presence or absence of subjects. Lexical subjects can be omitted in pro-drop languages but not in non-pro-drop languages. The pro-drop parameter encompasses a number of properties that is on the presence or absence of subject pronouns and that of expletive subjects.So framed in the principles and parameters theory and based on some foreign empirical studies, this paper makes a comparative research of pro-drop parameter setting between these two kinds of English-language educational models梚nstruction and immersion. We use the experimental method. The experimental group, which is exposed to 'experimental' , immersion, was compared to an equivalent group, the control group, which is taught by another formal approach, instruction.With the help of multivariate analysis of SPSS10.0, we found there is a significant difference between the grammaticality judgments on thesentences with subjects and sentences without referential pronoun subjects of two classes, yet there is no significant difference on the sentences without expletive subjects. However, on the whole, there is a significant difference between the grammaticality judgments on four aspects of pro-drop properties of two models. The overall results show that immersion is more helpful than instruction for children' s pro-drop parameter resetting and according to UG, immersion is more effective than instruction for children' s English-language learning. The important finding is that acquisition is the optima...