A Case Study Of Chinese Junior Middle School Students' Acquisition Of BE

Interlanguage (IL) study plays an important role in SLA research. It provides generous information about the rules of language learning and enriches the theory of SLA. The IL researches can offer useful instructions to language pedagogy and teachers can adjust their teaching to facilitate the learning on a large scale.The study of Chinese Junior School students' acquisition of BE is the theme of this study. It investigates the free writing compositions of two natural classes from different grades in the same junior middle school. The data is analyzed by a concordancer and aims to explore the following acquisition features: What is the acquisition order of BE reflected in this study? What factors affect the order? What are the common error types of BE use? How often do the students make those errors? What factors cause the wrong use of BE?The findings of this research include: For the eight forms of BE, been is best used by learners and the two past tense forms of BE are most difficult for learners to master. Teaching procedure and time factor influence the acquisition of the eight BE forms. Among the six patterns of BE, couple be is employed by learners mostly, while quasi-modal be and lexical be are rarely found in learners' output. Altogether thirteen error types are found in learners' output. The wrong tense of be, subject + AP/NP and subject + be + (adv) + verb are the three main types that learners mainly make. Some types are influenced by negative L1 transfer; some are affected by negativeintralingual transfer, others are caused by economy principle and teaching procedure.Based on the above findings, teachers can properly arrange the teaching procedure and offer some exercises to facilitate students' learning. And they should pay more attention to the teaching of the past tense of BE.Since some limitations exist, the generalization of this study needs to be validated. And further researches on this aspect are needed.