Investigation And Analysis Of Chinese College ESL Learners' Acquisition Of English Noun Plurals

This is a cross-sectional study on Chinese college ESL learners'acquisition of the plural in English nouns. The method employed in this study is a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies. The former takes a dominant role and the latter is a complement to the former. The data of quantitative study mainly originate from a self-designed questionnaire. The qualitative study is based on the answers to the questions in the questionnaire and the results of a retrospective interview.The choice of this topic is determined by the following facts. Since second language acquisition became an independent discipline in the 1960s, the study of how people acquire a second language has been conducted in almost every possible detail from all kinds of perspectives. The focus of SLA has been on how L2 learners acquire grammatical sub-systems, such as the definite and indefinite articles, and negatives. However, few studies focus on the acquisition of the number of English nouns, not to mention Chinese learners'acquisition of the plural in English nouns, which may cause a lot of difficulties for Chinese learners, as there are distinct differences in the ways of expressing number between Chinese and English. Two hypotheses are proposed in this thesis. They are (1) the interlanguage concerning the plural of nouns for Chinese college ESL learners of higher proficiency levels is closer to the target language than that for learners of lower proficiency levels; and (2) Chinese (L1) does play a negative role in Chinese college ESL learners'acquisition of English noun plurals.In order to testify the preceding hypotheses, this study is based on three theories: language transfer, markedness theory and conceptual transfer. Language transfer has long been a very important and controversial issue in second language acquisition.