Research On The Accessibility Of Universal Grammar Of The English Acquisition Of The First Year Students From Zhangzhou No.1High School

The Full-time High School English Syllabus published by the Ministry of NationalEducation pointed out that foreign language is an important tool for the study of cultural andscientific knowledge and it is also an important tool to obtain international information. Butfor a long time, the students in high school can’t master English. This makes the researchersdevelop a keen interest in the accessibility of the English learning. Recently, more and moreresearchers are interested in the study of the accessibility of the Universal Grammar ofEnglish language.This thesis aims to investigate Chinese high school students’ acquisition of the universalprinciples, which are about the constraints of wh-movement. These students are in Grade Oneof Zhangzhou No.1High School. Since the first language of these high school students isChinese, which does not involve the wh-movement, the Subjacency Principle and the EmptyCategory Principle are not obvious in Chinese. However, the wh-movement exists in English,and is constrained by the two universal principles. So if these high school students obey thesetwo principles, we can conclude that the Universal Grammar is accessible in their Englishacquisition.The author tested these high school students’ general performance both in thegrammatical judgment and in the reading comprehension and their different attitudes towardsthe different sentences which violate either the Subjacency Principle or the Empty CategoryPrinciple. SPSS, a statistical instrument, is used to analyze the experimental data. Togetherwith the syntactic analysis and the comparison with that of native speakers, The author findsthat these high school students are sensitive to the two universal principles, that is to say, theUniversal Grammar is accessible to these high school students’ English acquisition.