Interlanguage Development Of Chinese EFL Learners From Topic Prominence To Subject Prominence

Typologically, Chinese is a topic-prominent language while English a subject-prominent language (Li & Thompson, 1976). In the field of second language acquisition, there have been considerable studies concerned with learners' interlanguage development from topic/subject prominence to subject/topic prominence. Nevertheless, Research is limited as most of them seemed to have been done either at the performance level or at the competence level only, which yielded different results.From the perspectives of both the performance level and competence level, the present study attempts to investigate Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage development from topic prominence to subject prominence. Four issues were examined in the investigation: (a) potential L1 transfer of certain topic-prominent constructions, (b) unlearning of certain topic-prominent constructions, (c) differences between learners' actual performance and linguistic competence with regard to unlearning topic prominence, (d) different features among learners of different L2 proficiency levels.A multi-focus investigation was conducted among four groups of 110 Chinese EFL learners from middle school students to postgraduates with respect to their interlanguage development from topic prominence to subject prominence, by using a translation task to test their actual performance and a questionnaire of acceptability judgment to explore their inner competence.The findings yield the asymmetry of possible L1 transfer of topic prominence at the performance level and immunity from L1-like topic prominence at the competence level. At the performance level, topic-prominent constructions in Chinese are found to be transferable during L2-English acquisition. With the increase of the L2 proficiency levels, the subjects' interlanguage gradually transformed from topic prominence to target-like subject prominence. Nevertheless, at the competence level, the results reveal the subjects' capability of identifying and rejecting incorrect English sentences with Chinese-like topic-prominent constructions.Furthermore, the degree of difficulty in unlearning different topic-prominent constructions turns out to be different. The subjects can easily unlearn topic-prominent constructions that go against the basic syntax mode of SVO in English, which can be attributed to the indirect positive evidence—strong inflectional features in English, whereas within the CP structure, some problems are found in unlearning certain base-generated topics at Spec-CP in Chinese.In addition, the learners of different L2 proficiency levels are characterized with specific features in unlearning certain topic-prominent constructions. The learners of higher levels are found to fall into over-generalization with regard to object-fronting structures while the learners of lower levels undergo an obviously gradual acquisition process with regard to head-dropped structures.The findings of the present study contribute to a better understanding of Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage development from topic prominence to subject prominence at both the performance level and the competence level, though it is necessary to verify the conclusions in longitudinal studies and by further exploring learners' natural output data at the discourse level.