The Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis Of The Ability Of Chinese English Learners To Circumlocute--Based On An Empirical Study

Since the mid 1970s there has been a growing interest not only in non-native speakers' acquisition of grammatical forms of the target language, but in their development of communication competence in the target language, where communicative competence refers to the internalized knowledge of the language user which results in the ability to produce and comprehend grammatically accurate and situational appropriate utterances (Ellis, 1994). Circumlocution, as one of most eye-catching marker of such competence, recently has received lots of attention (Savignon, 1983; Jourdain, 2000; Scullen, 2000). This paper is intended to study how well Chinese English learners, get familiar with, make use of and benefit from circumlocution, the communicative strategy that enhances the efficiency of conveying information and successfully implementing conversation. The observation was conducted on the comparatively successful English learners, and a series of corpora and linguistic data have been collected and analyzed. Similarities with and differences from the norms of native speakers have been found out. Chinese English learners, during the observation, were found to use similar sub-categories while circumlocuting, but in their utterances, quite a few factors prevented them from really behaving like natives, to be specific here, possessing the native-like ability to circumlocute, the ultimate objective considered by considerable number of language learners.Discussion about the performance of the subjects is supplied, from which guidance and advice towards application of better circumlocution for fluent expression of one's thoughts in English are presented to Chinese learners of English. Also, this empirical study can provide tangible validation for the revolutionary reform in English teaching and learning.