The Effects Of L2Proficiency On Chinese ESL Learners’ Comprehension Of English Passive Sentences

This thesis intends to study if there are similarities and differences between thecomprehension of English passive sentences by high proficiency and low proficiency Englishlearners by testing how they comprehend English passive sentences, striving to analyze thereasons lying behind the similarities and differences and to explore the relationship betweenEnglish proficiency level and comprehension of English passive sentences from the perspectiveof psycholinguistics. This thesis is an empirical study involving40graduate English majors asthe high proficiency group and40middle school Senior Three students as the low proficiencygroup, who were both tested by20English sentences distributed randomly, including fourcategories of different sentences, namely plausible actives, implausible actives, plausiblepassives and implausible passives. They were required to listen to the English sentences andname out loud the agent of each sentence. Since the two groups both performed at ceiling incertain conditions, the analyses of the results were carried out by using nonparametric methods,including Mann-Whitney U test, Spearman correlation coefficient and Wilcoxon signed rankstest.The results of the experiment turn out that the second language proficiency has importanteffects on the comprehension of English passive sentences by Chinese students. The highproficiency group outperformed their low proficiency counterparts a lot (z=-11.119, p=0.000),and the second language proficiency level was found to be positively correlated to thecomprehension of English passive sentences (r=0.623, p=0.000). Students with different levelsinterpret the English passives in different ways, and generally the passives and implausiblesentences are more difficult to understand. The study also reinforces the notion that sentenceprocessing is a combination of both syntactic algorithms and simple heuristics, depending onsituation, time pressure, or person preference. It is suggested that the teachers should pay moreattention to impart the full schema of the passive construction to the students and increase thechances that the students encounter the passives in a natural way as their English proficiencygrow.