Investigation And Research On Chinese College ESL Learners' Acquisition Of Passive Voice

This thesis aims to probe into Chinese ESL learners' acquisition of passive voice. We employ the quantitative and qualitative research methods. Besides, the information in quantitative research comes from the self-designed test while the qualitative research is based on one questionnaire in the test.The thesis makes a brief introduction about the background. From the 1960's and 1970's, the second language acquisition became an independent discipline. Researcher employed different research methods and made thorough research into how learners acquired the second language from various perspectives, among which few studies focused on how learners acquired passive voice, not to mention the Chinese learners' acquisition of passive voice.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the research background and study objectives and the contents of each chapter. Chapter Two introduces the classification and features of passive structure. Quirk's classification, Granger's classification and classification in this thesis are presented respectively. Chapter Three describes related literature and its theoretical basis, including interlanguage theory, language transfer, fossilization, error analysis and comparative analysis and markedness theory. Studies on the acquisition of passive are reviewed and comparatively analyzed in this chapter.Chapter Four introduces the research subjects, instrument and approach, specific procedures. This empirical thesis tests on the 104 subjects who are freshmen and sophomores, all majored in science, from the same university. All subjects are required to take a test, which has five parts including the transformation between active and passive voice, multiple choices, Chinese to English translation and English to Chinese translation sentence, and a self-made questionnaire about their basic personal information. Chapter Five gives a discussion about the statistics gained, analyzes the data collected and provides the results of this study, that is, under-passivization is the most frequent occurrence in three passive error types, next is the mixed-up passivization while over-passivization happens the least. Based on the findings, we discuss the main reasons for the passive errors mentioned above: 1. Language transfer and insufficient grasping of verbs bring a negative effect on learners committing these errors. 2. Contrast of cultural thought patterns in Chinese and English language. The contrast resulted in the acquisition obstacle to the Chinese learning. Chinese prefer image, synthetic and parataxis while English just prefer the object, that is, abstraction, analysis and hypotaxis. 3. Different features between English and Chinese passive voice. Chinese and English belong to two completely different language systems. English verbs have different forms in active voice and passive voice, while the forms of Chinese verbs have not any change in different voices and tenses. During the acquisition of English passive, Chinese learners will inevitably commit errors because of the differences between the two languages.Chapter Six is a conclusion, which summarizes the major findings, the implication for teaching, limitations of this study and offers some suggestions for further research. In this chapter, we have the conclusion that under-passivization is the main characteristic of Chinese learner's passive acquisition, i.e., under-passivization is the most frequent occurrence in three passive error types, next is the mixed-up passivization while over-passivization happens the least.