A Study Of English Acquisition Sequence Of Chinese Students: Processability Theory Perspective

In Second Language Acquisition, language developmental sequence has a very important place. In the late 1960s and early 1970s SLA research attention shifted to studies investigating whether L2 learners went through predictable stages of development in learning a second language. From the time Clahsen, Meisel, and Pienemann published their seminal study from the ZISA project, the idea of a fixed acquisitional sequence for grammatical phenomena in a second language has been widely addressed.Pienemann's later work, which has built on the insights from the ZISA study, is a reorientation of the Multidimensional Model. This reorientation, known as Processability Theory (PT), uses components from Levelt's speech model; the grammatical frame work utilized is a unification grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar. PT deals with the development, or emergence, of a learner grammar and spells out processing prerequisites that are posited as necessary for the acquisition of grammatical rules at different developmental stages, thereby establishing an acquisitional hierarchy. The acquisition process can be described as a gradual construction of a mental grammar in which each stage of development is built on the acquisition of the preceding stages. Pienemann and Johnson had applied processing hierarchy into English as second language for the Spanish, Polish first language learners.We are wondering if it will happen in the same way for our Chinese English learners. In our research, there are some questions we also have to focus on, including the following: Why do some L2-learners appear not to progress in development? Focusing on those questions, this research was carried out to find whether there are evidences from the writing samples that the subjects in this study developed similarly in relation to the stages above proposed in the processability theory. To test our hypothesis, we choose the agreement morphemes and syntax structures as the main features we studied which of them can compose a relatively comprehensive procedure for English second acquisition process. The research utterances were produced by three informants, of which 1,775 were collected for the purpose of this study. Each of the informants was required to write one composition after they had learned the grammar in that unit in four times. We got the information from their writing production for the study of the acquisition of L2 grammar. In our studies, three informants'data presentation shows a very distinctive sequence in the agreement morphemes acquisition, especially through Han's interlanguage progression development. As we investigated, testing the predictions of the agreement morphologies in our studies produced very solid empirical support for the overall approach.It should be added that within processability theory interlanguage variation is constrained. In other words, it is defined as a specific range of structural options that are available to the learner. This range of structural options results from the fact that the learner's limited processing resources constrain the way in which he or she can avoid structures which have not yet been acquired. The fact that language learners pass through fixed stages of acquisition, that the learner breaks the target language up into small units in a fixed order, and that there are clearly identifiable constraints on the teachability of languages, all of these observations have implications for teaching practices. The three main areas that are affected were mentioned below: syllabus construction, assessment and error correction.There are limitations in our studies since we carried it out, our corpus is rather limited. Not all structures are documented by at least one learner who displays evidence that the structure marks a developmental step. At last, further research suggestions were put forward in order to conduct next studies. The dissertation follows this way below:In Chapter 1, we present a general introduction to the study, which includes the purpose and the problem we will focus on, the definition of several selected terms and the theoretical considerations and assumptions in our study.In Chapter 2, stage development theories are lay out since we will mainly take the ESL acquisition sequence as the topic in our research. Secondly, we will introduce the overview of Proceesability Theory, and the application of PT to ESL development and also presents some empirical studies. Since the hierarchy of processing procedures is the core of PT, and the hierarchy is the main explanation of acquisition sequences from the pocessability perspective, we illustrate this point in very details. In this chapter, we also list some theories concerning the agreement morphemes in English, because this feature will be studied in our research.In Chapter 3, we will focus on the study itself; describe the research design and the method of analysis in order to test the hypotheses on development stages. We also explain the method of distributional analysis as well as the acquisition criteria (emergence criterion) for each test structure. And also we will show how we apply this criterion to do in our research.Chapter 4 will analyze the collecting data according to processability theory. The learner data will be reported individually with quantitative displays of the production of all the key TL structures at different point along the developmental time axis. The data is summarized in terms of quantitative figures and ratios to give the reader an approximated indication of the learner's dynamic interlanguage system. And we will analyze the data in different aspects.In Chapter 5, we will demonstrate the pedagogic implications in three main areas: syllabus construction, assessment and error correction. And we will point out the limitations in our study and give the suggestions for further research.