A Study Of Chinese Students' Acquisition Of English Adverbial Participial Clause

By conventional wisdom, adverbial participial clause derives from adverbial clause for brevity. That is only partly true because adverbial participial clause goes beyond adverbial clause in terms of its structure: it has its own logic subject and the capacity of description, particularly, in narrative writing. Small wonder some researchers agree that the capability of adverbial participial clause indicates English proficiency and only people with higher proficiency level are likely to use it, even for native speakers. There is no doubt that of the same literacy, the natives have better performance than non-native speakers when Hinkel (2002) does a comparison between non-native English users and English natives on adverbial participial clauses.But among non-native users, it seems that language proficiency is not the critical factor in their use of adverbial participial clauses. Instead, it is the mother tongue that may be more closely related to the use of adverbial participial clauses. Therefore, this study is supposed to shed some light Chinese English learners'knowledge and use of English adverbial participial clauses so as to find out whether and how Chinese affects their capability of adverbial participial clauses.Through comparison between Chinese and English in aspects related to adverbial participial clauses, it is found that in Chinese there are structures similar to complement and temporal adverbial clause in English. A research test is designed and the results show that the students in this study who have passed CET-4 and those have not, present similar performances on adverbial participial clauses. Their knowledge about the structure is vague and they are prone to violate the attachment rule due to the differences between English and Chinese. Moreover, students both of high English proficiency and low English proficiency have done best in complement adverbial clauses, better than adjunct adverbial participial clauses and worst in hierarchical adverbial clauses. It tells that the similarity of Chinese and English in complement adverbial clauses and adjunct adverbial clauses make it easier for Chinese learners to understand and acquire English adverbial participial clauses.