An Empirical Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’Acquisition Of Wh-questions

Feature theory is a recent development in the Minimalist Program of generative grammar and feature assembly has been extensively applied to the study of L2grammar. Adopting feature theory and feature assembly as its theoretical framework, this thesis examines the development of Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of L2syntax-morphology and the causes of variability in SLA by comparing Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of different types of Wh-questions (Simple Sentence Wh-questions (SS Wh-Qs) vs. Complex Sentence Wh-questions (CS Wh-Qs); Single Wh-questions (S Wh-Qs) vs. Multiple Wh-questions (M Wh-Qs); Subject Wh-questions (S Wh-Qs) vs. Object Wh-questions (O Wh-Qs)).A quantitative approach is adopted in the present study. Altogether two tasks (the Grammaticality Judgement Task and Elicited Sentence Production Task) were administered to three groups of subjects at three different proficiency levels (low level, intermediate level and advanced level). The results from analysis of the data showed that on the whole, the performance on test items investigating SS Wh-Qs was better than that on those for the CS Wh-Qs, S Wh-Qs was better than that on those of the M Wh-Qs, O Wh-Qs was better than that on those for S Wh-Qs. Besides, the subjects at higher proficiency levels achieved higher average score on each task. It is argued that L2learners’ variability is not caused by lack of abstract syntactic knowledge, but by the feature assembly complexity involved in L2lexical item reassembly. The difficulty in acquiring a target lexical item exceeds that of another with more features and feature operations and with more flexible feature operation. In addition, learners’performance in features involving syntax-semantics interface is higher than that in simple form features. Besides, in the process of feature reassembly, learners’interlanguage is influenced by LI feature transfer, and at the same time, it is affected by the features of L2, which results in overgeneralization of L2features.By extending the scope covered by previous research (including subject groups, methods, and linguistic properties), the present study provides a more comprehensive picture of Chinese EFL learnners’acquisition of Wh-questions, thus enriching SLA empirical research with new findings. The results of this study are consistent with the syntax-morphology separation hypothesis, indicating that L2learners’variability is not caused by lack of abstract syntactic knowledge, but by the feature assembly complexity involed in L2lexical item assembly, which is of some value for theory construction.