Study On The Acquisition Of English Locative Constructions By Chinese College Students Of Different English Proficiencies

Construction Grammar has been studied more and more home and abroad. Furthermore, English locative constructions have been probed into from different angles, and there are some disagreements on the research results and conclusions. Therefore, further researches are still anticipated to be done on the acquisition of English locative constructions.The present study explores the acquisition of English locative construction by Chinese college learners at different English proficiency levels. The following research questions are addressed: (1) Do lower and higher English proficiency group acquire English locative constructions? (2) Does English proficiency level affect the acquisition of the knowledge about English locative constructions? (3) Does the knowledge about Chinese locative constructions affect the acquisition of English locative constructions?The subjects were 30 non-English major sophomores and 30 English major sophomores from Chongqing University. According to the subjects'English proficiency, they were divided into lower English proficiency group (the subjects are non-English major sophomore.) and higher English proficiency group (the subjects are English sophomore). The subjects were required to finish following four experimental tasks: elicited production task, enforced sentence selection task, construction entailment inferring task and English into Chinese translation task. All the data were analyzed by SPSS 11.5. The results showed that two groups can produce some English locative constructions; higher English proficiency group acquired more knowledge about object holism effect and meaning entailment of ground constructions than that of lower English proficiency group; two groups used more Chinese sentences without the object holism effect. The findings indicate that the subjects acquired some knowledge of English locative constructions. English proficiency affects the acquisition of English locative constructions, and higher English proficiency group acquired more knowledge of English locative constructions than lower English proficiency group. The findings confirmed that knowledge of Chinese locative constructions affected the acquisition of English locative constructions. Suggestions to future research, implications and limitations of the current study are also discussed.