The Empirical Research On The Acquisition Of Non-predicate Verbs For Chinese Learners

Grammar acquisition, one of the most important part in SLA, has always beenattached much attention. Many experts have done a lot of research on it, but the studyon acquisition of English non-predicate verb is limited. The present study is just atentative research to get to know the situation of Chinese learners’ acquisition. Onesenior class in the common high school, one sophomore class in the private college inWuhan and one postgraduate class in the university of the Province were randomlychosen to finish a test paper and a questionnaire in the present study. The paper nearlycovers all the usages of English non-predicate verbs, aiming to examine their respectiveacquisition of infinitive, gerund, present participle and past participle, and their abilityof pattern recognition and output. The questionnaire mainly checks whether theirdifficulty perception of the grammar patterns and meaning is consistent with their realdifficulty. All the raw data were input into the computer for one-way ANOVA andpaired sample t correlation with SPSS Statistic17.0. The result shows that the overallnon-predicate verb acquisition of Chinese learners is far from satisfaction. As they stepinto a further learning stage, conversely, the acquisition seemed even worse. Moreover,they possess a significant superiority in pattern and meaning recognition over output.The acquisition of infinitive and present participle is better, while gerund and pastparticiple is worse. That has been reflected evidently in the subjective and objectivequestions. Next, the result of the questionnaire reveals that a majority of the studentshave a wrong perception of the real difficult part. They generally took gerund and pastparticiple as the most difficult while the other two easier, which would be bound to theacquisition.Then the author analyses what has been found with the theory of the SLA,Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Psychology, such as pattern recognition, languageattrition, fossilization and motivation, etc., and the explanation of the grammar and itsdifficulty. The conclusion proves that the reasons for those problems are as follows:firstly, the quality of grammar teaching in the college seems to slack off. Collegestudents often rely on self-learning, so their problems brought from high school arealways hard to resolve, and they are unable to achieve a higher level throughself-learning. Therefore, grammar teaching should be still emphasized in the college, especially more difficult grammar point’ s input intensification and outputdiversification. Secondly, the students will suffer from language attrition andfossilization when they come into the college and postgraduate period, particularly forthe aspect of grammar learning. Besides, their learning motivation also affects theirchoice of learning content and emphasis. Finally, their false perception for the difficultyof the grammar appeals to teachers’ in-time awareness and correction.