On The Acquisition Sequence Of English Grammatical Morphemes Of The Middle School Students In China

SLA (Second Language Acquisition) began to be recognized as a discipline in its own right during the 1970s. However, the researches in this field had begun before its recognition. In 1950s and 1960s, Contrastive Analysis (CA) mainly focused on interference errors caused by the mother tongue. While in 1970s, Error Analysis (EA) held that the interference from mother tongue was extremely small in SLA, at least it was the case in the field of syntax. Therefore, it focused on the developmental errors caused by the complexity of language itself. In 1980s, the researchers tended to study CA and EA within the frame of interlanguage. After a series of phases, a basic research question has remained the same: What is the role of the first language in SLA? Or is interlanguage a continuum stretching from the learner's mother tongue to target language, in which the learner is seen as gradually replacing features of his mother tongue as he acquires features of the target tongue or a continuum in which the learner is seen as slowly creating the rule system of the target language in a manner very similar to the child's acquisition of his first language? CA corresponds to the former view, while EA supports the latter view. Empirical research played an important part in his shift from CA to EA. These researches mainly focused on the field of syntax, which was represented by Dulay and Burt's researches on English grammatical morphemes. The researchers hoped to prove that there was a universal 'natural order' in SLA by these empirical researches, so that they could come to the conclusion: SLA, similar to first language acquisition, is a creative construction, in which first language has little influence. The intention of the researchers corresponds to Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG).These empirical research provided evidence for the universality of interlanguge (IL). It is indicated that there are three universal principles governing IL development:1) ILs vary systematically. The grammatical rules of ILS follow the features of universal principles and internal consistency of language. The learner's IL is systematic and rule-governed. 2) ILs exhibit common acquisition and developmental sequences. SLA is guided by internal rules which have little to do with the learner's LI. 3) ILs are more or less influenced by the learner's LI. A better understanding of the internal rules of SLA is made easier with a good knowledge of the interlanguage's universality.The acceptability of the universality of interlanguage should largely attribute to Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG), which consists of principles and parameters. Principles refer to the highly abstract grammars which are applicable to any language, while parameters reflect the differences between languages. The principle reflects the universality of human languages. It is genetically endowed. UG is applicable to first language acquisition. The question of whether L2 learners have access to UG has been the main topic of research among those interested in applying principles and parameters theory to second language acquisition. We put it as a choice between three possibilities: 1) SLA has no-access to UG; 2) SLA has an indirect-access to UG ; 3) SLA has a direct-access to UG. As far as the syntactic field is concerned, we prefer the third possibility. The syntactic acquisition manner of SLA is quite similar to that of first language acquisition.After Dulay and Burt, the researchers carried out a series of empirical research on the acquisition sequence of English grammatical morphemes in SLA. They came to a conclusion: Learners from different Lls follow roughly the same sequence when they learn English grammatical morphemes. The subjects in these researches are mainly Spanish, French, and German-speaking learners. These languages, as well as English, belong to the same language family. So, what about the sequence of Chinese learners? From this perspective, the present study aims to use the cross-sectional experimental method to investigate the acquisition sequence of the English grammatical morphemes for the Chinese middle school students and compare it with that of the western learners. The theoretical significance of the study lies in itsattribution to the development of "creative construction" theory. In terms of application, it can serve as a reference for the syllabus designing and English teaching for the Chinese students.