The L2 Acquisition Of English Ditransitive Constructions By Chinese EFL Learners

The present study investigates the L2 acquisition of English ditransitive constructions by Chinese EFL learners in light of Goldberg's Construction Grammar. More specifically, verb classes, and the L1 transfer, will be analyzed in this thesis.The present research has theoretical significance in studying the L2 acquisition of English ditransitive construction by Chinese EFL learners and so that enriching our understanding of English ditransitive construction from the angles of Goldberg's Construction Grammar. Its practical significance lies in its purpose to improve Chinese EFL learners' learning of English ditransitive constructions.The research questions to be addressed in this thesis fall into two questions: (1) How do non-English major students acquire the English Ditransitive Construction? (2) What role does L1 play in this process? Put in another way, does learners' L1 have impact on their acquisition of English ditransitive construction?In order to answer the two questions, we followed a fine grained cross-linguistic comparison by Zhang (2007) which was carried out with a constructionist view. The analysis shows that the canonical construction for ditransitive verbs in Chinese is the preverbal prepositional gei/ba/jiang construction. Based on the specific verb-classes, the Canonical Construction Hypothesis is formulated.In this research, a translation task was employed to collect data on the acquisition of English ditransitive construction and testify the Canonical Construction Hypothesis. 74 non-English-major college students were chosen to participate in the experiment. The results reveal that the Chinese EFL learners showed a general preference for PDs over DODs for the verb classes investigated, verifying the Canonical Construction Hypothesis. It indicates that the ease of internalizing what is already internalized in L1 is strengthened in the L2 grammar. On the other hand, we found that the acquisition process is more of the interaction of overgeneralization and L1 transfer. What's more, learners in the lower grade or lower English level can be easily affected by the effect of L1 transfer. Some implications of present research in English teaching and learning, its limitations and the suggestions for future research were also discussed.