Investigation On The Role Of Prefabricated Language In Teenagers' Second Language Acquisition

The debate over the role of memorized chunks of sentences called prefabricated language (PL) in teenagers' second language acquisition (SLA) has a long history. Mainly because of a methodological problem in defining and identifying PL and in distinguishing it from creative language, previous studies of PL have not provided clear and convincing evidence to support the claim that PL directly feeds into creative language. Also, the previous studies have failed to answer the question of a possible "reanalysis" of PL by an internal or preprogrammed process.However, up till now, empirical research in this area is rare, especially in China. In order to fill in the gap in the area, author carries out the empirical research. The present study addresses the following three research questions: 1. What are the learners' beliefs in PL? 2. Are the novel phrases/sentences made of PL or by free combination of single words? 3. Does the use of PL contribute to the construction of creative language? This study was an attempt to solve the methodological problems and to investigate whether and how PL contributes to the creative process during the initial stage in SLA. In order to determine the relationship between PL and creative language, the author used the quantitative and qualitative study and tries to make some new contributions to it.As it is expected, learners hold a strong belief in learning PL. The results also showed that most of the creative language in this study was constructed from PL instead of from freely combined single words. Qualitative examination of the data revealed that the subjects who produced a larger number of creative sentences possessed a greater variety of PL. Additionally, some productive errors and rule applications were present during PL analysis by the subjects. These findings suggest that PL is the origin of creative language and that young learners also actively seek abstract rules. The study reveals that PL plays a major role in the beginning stages of SLA.Finally, this study, which has some pedagogical implications, also raises issues for future studies.