Developmental Patterns Of L2 And L1 Acquisition In Early Stage

For many years,linguists have never ceased to satisfy their interests in the second language(L2) learners' overall development of language competence acquired at different stages.It is supposed that L2 acquisition proceeds in a regular,systematic fashion.Two questions will be answered in examining the descriptive evidence that lends support to the existence of regular developmental patterns in L2 acquisition:do learners acquire some target-language features before others? How do learners acquire a particular target-language linguistic feature? The former question explores the acquisition order of L2,while the latter discusses the acquisition sequence.With the promotion of the Chinese language to the outside world,there is an urgent need for us to consider the entirety of learner language in order to facilitate the Chinese acquisition and teaching both efficiently and effectively.The author of this thesis was dispatched to Hungary for a two-year stint of teaching Chinese to the Hungarian pupils in 2006,making it possible to carry out a longitudinal study on the developmental patterns of Chinese as a L2.This study has traced down an eight-year old Hungarian student's learning Chinese as his L2 for about 2 academic years.Notes and journals are written whenever the researcher finds the subject making improvement in his language competence.The pupil's utterances are recorded as the sources and evidences that demonstrate his general process of developmental patterns.Findings about his acquisition order and sequence are compared to the previous studies on the native speakers' developmental patterns of acquiring Chinese as L1.The following findings are obtained in this study:1.Hungarian student's acquiring Chinese as L2 in is such patterns:(1) Hungarian student undergoes three stages when he is acquiring Chinese as L2,that is,silent period,period of mimicry and telegraphic sentence,and period of association of similarity and sentence generation;(2) Words associated with everyday life,in particular nouns,are acquired in the first sequence;(3)这—我—你—他is the acquisition order of pronouns;(4) The student acquires the Yes-No interrogative sentence gradually from tone-raising to the use of interrogative mark'吗',before finally coming up with a well-organized sentence;(5) As to the Wh-question sentence,the student first acquires'什么',and then'哪儿', finally'谁'.2.The Hungarian student takes a similar route to that of L1 acquisition when they are learning Chinese as L2.3.Similarities,in details,of the developmental pattems of both L1 and L2 are evident:the three stages that the Hungarian undergoes are coincidentally parallel to the general route of native Chinese acquire their L1,from the pre-language stage to the single-word sentence stage and to the telegraphic stage.The beginning words and pronouns are also acquired in a similar order.However,when the student acquires a specific syntactical feature such as interrogative sentence,there are differences from the sequence of L1 acquisition.Finally,in the light of the above findings,the author suggests that L2 acquisition in a natural setting should be valued,especially the acquisition of child learners.