An Empirical Study On English Affix Acquisition Of EFL Learners And Its Implications

Over the past ten years, the new tendency of vocabulary study is the theoretic explorations and empiricalstudies of word knowledge of the second language, in which the most influential scholars are Nation P., MearaP., Schmitt N. and Laufer B and so on. Their new tendency is the changing of the study focus from vocabularysize, the “width of vocabulary acquisition” to “depth”, i.e. the study of the acquisition process of various types ofknowledge related to a word (pronunciation, spelling, meaning, collocation, word class, etc.).However, theempirical studies of word knowledge and the width of vocabulary acquisition were carried out in recent ten years,and the levels concerned with the study were quite limited because of the difficulties of design and operation.The domestic empirical studies of word knowledge have been done in recent years, and the study methods arerelatively simple. Besides, the analysis studies of word knowledge among groups and dimensions are relativelyfew and the comparative studies of cross-grade and cross-level are also few. Based on these factors, the presentstudy analyzes the Chinese students’ affix acquisition conditions with the methods of quality and quantity, so asto explore some implications.The present study consists of six chapters. Chapter One mainly introduces the research background; ChapterTwo is literature review; Chapter Three is the theoretical framework, including Richards (1976) and Nation(1990)’s vocabulary knowledge frameworks and the acquisition order hypothesis contributed by Dulay&Burt(1973,1974), Rod Ellis (1994), Krashen (1994) and Mochizuki (2000). Chapter Four describes research designin details with three research questions, that is,(1) What are the characteristics, for Chinese students, in the threedimensions of affix acquisition, namely, recognition, understanding and word-formation? Is there any markeddifference among the three dimensions?(2) Nation’s division of English affixes’ difficulty levels is applicable toChinese students or not? If yes, in which dimension?(3) How is the mastery of affix acquisition of L2learnerswith different proficiency? What are the influences of L2proficiency on affix acquisition?137students fromNorthwest Normal University and No.63Middle School of Lanzhou are selected as the subjects of the presentstudy. The study analyzes students’ affix acquisition with Nation (1990)’s vocabulary knowledge frameworkstheory, and analyzes the data by SPSS13.0. The study is based on the theoretical frameworks and languageacquisition order hypothesis, referring to Mochizuki (2000)’s affix knowledge test and the interview as theinstrumentation. The researching process consists of the affix knowledge test, the interview and the collectionand analysis of the data. In data analysis and discussion part of Chapter Five, the data from the study areanalyzed by SPSS13.0. After the author gets the initial research results, more discussions and explanations of the factors about these results are to be given. Lastly, Chapter Six is the findings, illuminations and limitations ofthe present study.The conclusions of the present study about English affix acquisition are as follows:(1) There is significantdifference in the three dimensions of recognition, understanding and word-formation of China’s English learners’affix acquisition. These three dimensions of affix acquisition could be listed according to difficulty as:recognition→understanding→word-formation which could accord with the general regulation of students’vocabulary acquisition.(2) Nation’s division of English affixes’ difficulty levels, as a whole, is applicable to thesituation of Chinese students’ affix acquisition, especially applicable to the dimensions of understanding andword-formation. But, it is not applicable to the dimension of recognition.(3) The subjects’ general Englishproficiency has great influence on their affix acquisition. In general, students’ affix knowledge could beimproved with the improvement of their second language proficiency.