An Empirical Study On English Participle Acquisition Of The Chinese College Students Of Arts

The process of English learning is a process of creating interlanguage (IL), developing IL by constantly correcting errors. It is inevitable that English learners on different levels make different and many errors in their process of IL development. Analyzing errors in the EFL learners' IL is an important method in SLA and sheds much insight on the language pedagogy. Much research was done to study the IL errors of second language learners. However, the study on participles acquisition by the students of arts is still insufficient, which is significant for the further understanding of the IL characteristics of art-students, and thus we can take effective measures to help the majors of arts master English participles.Based on the theory of IL and error analysis (EA), four research questions are addressed:(1) To what extent do majors of arts master the English participles?(2) Is it true that the longer the art-student studies English, the better he/she acquires the English participles?(3) What are the difficulties for the majors of arts in the process of using participles?(4) What cause the errors committed in the use of participles by the college students of arts?The study involves cross-sectional study and developmental study as well. The subjects are the first graders and the third graders from College of Arts and Culture in Shandong University of Arts. They major in broadcasting and TV director, public utilities management, management of cultural and art industry, movie and TV arts and fine arts respectively.40 subjects are selected at random from the students of five majors in each grade who took the participle tests.The thesis consists of six chapters. Following the introduction chapter, the literature review presents the theoretical introduction and the basic knowledge of English participles. The approaches to analyzing errors will also be discussed. Chapter Three turns to methodology, which details the background of subjects, the instruments employed in the current research and data collection procedure. In the result chapter, distribution of error frequencies of participles will be reported. Chapter Five will be attributed to the analysis of the data collected. The last chapter winds up the thesis with some pedagogical suggestions as to instructing Chinese art-students in learning English participles.The research findings are presented as follows:1. Through the analysis of the data collected, a conclusion can be drawn that English participle is really a very difficult grammatical item for the students of arts to acquire.2. For the students of arts, English proficiency does not seem to be a factor which determines the correct use of the participles. Comparatively, the upper grade group has a better mastery of participles as predicative, dangling participles and participles as adverbial than the lower grade group, but they are weaker in gerunds, participles as attribute and participles as complement.3. The results show that for the students of arts, the correct rate of using participles as complement (78.7%) is the highest, participles as attribute (74.2%), gerunds (59.5%), participles as predicative (57%) and dangling participles (54.3%) in turn; the correct rate of using participles as adverbial (46.25%) is the lowest.4. On the whole, for the students of arts, they have difficulty in acquiring (1) absolute construction, (2) dangling participles, (3) perfective aspect of participles as adverbial, (4) the past participle of the intransitive verb, which is used as adjective to indicate the completion of the action, (5) the compound structure of gerund; and have some trouble in discriminating the usage of participles from that of the infinitive.5. The major sources responsible for the errors made by the art-students in the use of participles are:(1) negative transfer (literal translation), (2) overgeneralization (false analogy), (3) transfer of training and (4) failure in rule application. Among them, apart from negative transfer which belongs to the interlingual errors, the other three all belong to intralingual errors. In the case of the intralingual errors, transfer of training plays a larger role. Since some limitations exist as to the data collection and sample size, the paper ends up with putting forward some remedial teaching methods and suggestions based on the analysis of the results.