A Research On The Chinese L2ers' Acquisition Of English Past Tense From The Perspective Of IP Theory

The acquisition of English past tense is a very important research issue in the field of second language acquisition. Researchers at home and abroad have found that the English past tense can only be acquired at a later stage in the developmental pattern. For Chinese learners, there is the factor of'natural order'and there still exist some other issues such as L1 transfer, difference in typology and linguistic markers manifested both in verbs and adverbs.Many researchers have studied the English tense-aspect from perspectives of lexical aspect, verb salience and markedness. However, only a few researchers have studied the acquisition of past tense from the cognitive stance. This thesis tends to examine Chinese English learners'acquisition of past tense from the perspective of IP Theory (Input Processing Theory).Two questions are raised in the thesis:Question 1:Why acquisition of the English past tense is difficult to Chinese English learners?Question 2:Why is it the case that Chinese L2ers of English rely too much on time adverbs instead of grammatical tense markers as they acquire English language?Two hypotheses are made on the basis of these two questions:Hypothesis 1:The past tense in Chinese is decided by lexical markers while in English the past tense is decided by both lexical markers and grammatical markers. As Chinese L2ers of English process the past tense, they would initially process lexical markers in the English sentences but consider grammatical markers redundant and overlook them or process them in delay.Hypothesis 2:High-proficiency English learners process the past tense more successfully than low-proficiency English learners.Hypothesis 1 is testified by the data of experiment. However, hypothesis 2 is falsified through the data of translation tests. Corpus analysis and elicited experiments were used in the thesis in order to examine the master of past tense among Chinese English learners. In two elicited task experiments, the subjects were 60 non-English majors in grade two,30 English majors in grade three and 30 post graduates majoring in linguistics. They were asked to finish the two tasks respectively. After the tests, figures of results are drawn and Statistics Package for.Social Science (SPSS) is used to analyze and show descriptive statistics. PPT presentation task is also adopted to supplement the points the author wants to make.The result shows that learners'proficiency has little to do with their process of English past tense. Chinese English learners'acquisition of past tense depends too much on time adverbials in sentences, so the grammatical marker is often neglected or processed in delay. The possible reasons for the situation may be:effect of L1 parsing; learners'language proficiency, and the effect that L2 input (salient or not, degree of markedness) has on L2ers.Some pedagogical implications are proposed based on the results. Novelty, limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research are also put forward.