"To Be Or Not To Be"-The Process Of The Acquisition Of BE As Copula Category For Chinese Middle School EFL Learners

This paper aims at exploring the effect that Chinese grammatical category has upon the acquisition process of English copula BE category for Chinese middle school EFL learners.150 students from Grade Seven,Grade Nine and Senior Two participated in the experiment.The current experiment adopted a method of Chinese-English translation in order to examine the strength of impact of Chinese syntactic structure on the acquisition of copula BE-Structure in the subjects from different grades by observing their error rate and error types while translating the Chinese pilot sentences of the relevant patterns into English.The results indicated that Chinese syntactic category had a significant effect on the acquisition of English copula BE category and that the effect reduced with the advance of learners' L2 proficiency.In addition,we gained insight into the mechanism of L2 syntactic acquisition.It was demonstrated that the construction of L2 syntactic system was based on the L1 syntactic system and that the match with NL was the starting point of the construction of L2 syntactic system.