The Effect Of English Passive Voice Learning On The Use Of BEI Sentence By Chinese Freshmen

One of the major issues in the field of Second Language Acquisition(SLA) is the role of language learners' first language(L1) in the acquisition of a second language(L2), which SLA literature has shown extensive research on.Recently,researchers have begun testing the hypothesis that the second language influences the first or what sometimes is called "reverse" or "backward" transfer.In this study,an investigation was conducted to prove whether the English-like Chinese passive voice in the writing of Chinese EFL learners is the result of English to Chinese backward transfer,and how backward transfer in general may relate to the Chinese learners' L2 English proficiency and L1 Chinese proficiency in sentence and discourse tasks.Quantitative research method guides the study methodologically.To be more specific, questionnaires are used in this research;the experiment is carried out among 104 Chinese students of English in their first year in the University.These students enrolled at the university through the National Entrance Examinations.They took English as one of the main subjects in their middle school education,with 5 classes a week.After they were admitted into the university,they devoted a certain amount of their time to studying.In this study,they are required to finish two tasks:one sentence translation task(STT) and a discourse task(DT).In the STT,the subjects are asked to translate English sentences into Chinese,because of the factors like time and learners' contemporary linguistic proficiency,only twenty representative sentences are chosen from the examples in Wang's book(2004).In the DT,the ESL learners are asked to write a narrative of 100-150 words from six sequential pictures.For each picture,the ESL learners are instructed to explain what has happened to the motorcyclist.The former is to find out the manifestation of the Chinese non-bei construction in sentence translation task,the latter is to examine how they describe the passive events in Chinese,i.e.the frequency of non-bei structure.Out of the total data base,a statistical corpus was established on 60 eligible cases.For convenience of description,the subjects are divided into three levels according to their Chinese and English scores in the National Entrance Examination.The data computation was carried out by means of SPSS and EXCEL software for frequency accounts,correlation analysis,One-Way ANOVA tests,Chi-Square tests.Through the investigation based on learners' knowledge of passive voice and their production of passive voice in L1,the correlation between backward transfer and ESL learners' L1 and L2 proficiency has been found.The results suggest that backward transfer occurred in their L1 writing at the sentence level.Moreover,backward transfer is mitigated by L2 proficiency.Furthermore,among the Level 2 Chinese learners,the relationship between backward transfer and L2 proficiency in the Chinese sentence task follows a U-shaped curve.The results of this study point to the complexity of language transfer and its interaction with L2 proficiency and distinctive task types.Lastly,this thesis summarizes the main findings of this research,and proposes pedagogical implications derived from the complex language transfer,some limitations of this study are pointed out for later research and some other related issues are put forward.