An Empirical Study On The Acquisition Of English Wh-questions

The acquisition of wh-questions has always been a hot issue in the field of second language acquisition. Many scholars made some bold prediction on their acquisition difficulty hierarchy. The present study is based on the hypotheses of argument / adjunct asymmetry and subject / object asymmetry predicted by Stromswold (1995) and O'Grady (1997), and the typological differences between English and Chinese Wh-questions, which aim at verifying whether these asymmetries phenomena exist in the process of acquiring English wh-questions by Chinese English learners. Meanwhile, the acquisition difficulty hierarchy of this sentence structure and its causes were discussed and analyzed based on experimental data analysis, which will help the foreign language teachers to adjust their teaching strategies in their teaching practice and will guide the teaching more effective.The present study mainly adopted the quantitative approach. The participants were 105 freshmen of non-English majors. The interlanguage corpus was collected from a written grammatical test. All data analyses are performed with the system of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 17.0), in order to better understand the acquisition of the simple English wh-questions by Chinese intermediate level English learners.The result of this quantitative study showed that subject / object asymmetry and argument / adjunct asymmetry phenomena do exist in the process of acquiring English wh-questions by Chinese English learners. The present study result of subject / object asymmetry is support O'Grady's hypothesis; However, the result of argument / adjunct asymmetry is contradict with both Stromswold's and O'Grady's hypotheses. The difficulty hierarchy obtained by the present study from hard to easy is object attribute > adverbial > subject attribute> Object > subject. Meanwhile, the present study also further analyzed the profound reasons of this difficulty hierarchy.The present research has both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, the empirical analysis offers strong support for the asymmetry phenomena and the acquisition difficulty rating of English wh-questions by Chinese English learners. Pedagogically, it is beneficial for the English teachers to recognize the teaching points and difficulties. Therefore, the teachers can adjust their teaching strategy, so as to help the student get ride of the negative transfer of their mother tongue and acquire the English wh-question effectively.