The Acquisition Of English Existential Construction By Chinese EFL Learners

English Existential Construction (EEC) is often used to represent the existence orpresence of something. It has been one of the focuses of linguistics and secondlanguage acquisition studies. However, most of the studies on EEC by the Chinesescholars were mainly focused on the structure of EEC, the comparison of EEC andChinese Existential Construction (CEC), and few studies have been conducted toinvestigate the acquisition of EEC by Chinese-speaking learners of English.The present study is designed to explore the acquisition of the four types ofEEC (There be+NP, There+Relative Clause, There being/to be+NP, PP+VP+NP)from the perspective of iconicity theory. It recruited107Chinese-speaking EFLlearners who represented three English language proficiencies: Grade Three studentsfrom a Junior Middle School (Beginning Level), Grade Two students from a SeniorMiddle School (Intermediate Level) and the university freshmen who werenon-English majors (Advanced Level). The aim of the present thesis is aim to answerthe following three research questions:(1) Would the four types of EEC cause different degrees of learning difficulty forthe Chinese EFL learners?(2) Would the participants perform better on the EEC as their general languageproficiency improves?(3) What is the pattern of the Chinese EFL learners’ misuses of EEC?An English language proficiency test and an EEC test were administered to collectthe data. The following is the major findings summary of this study:First, the four types of EEC caused different degrees of learning difficulty forthe Chinese EFL learners. They performed best on There be+NP, and worst on Therebeing\to be+NP. In addition, in contrast to There be+NP and There be+NP+RC,PP+VP+NP and There being\to be+NP exerted a much higher degree of learningdifficulty on the participants.Second，there were significant differences between the three groups’ mean scores of EEC. U1’s performance on EEC was the best whereas J3performed the worst. Thismeans that the acquisition of EEC improved as the participants’ language proficiencyincreased. However, the analysis of the three groups’ performance on each of the fourtypes of EEC showed that only the performance of PP+VP+NP become better as theparticipants’ English language level improved.Third, the Chinese EFL learners mainly made these three types of errors of EEC:disagreement, misuse of tenses and There+have\has. The rate of disagreement errorand misuse of tenses decreased as the participant’s language proficiencies rose.However, for the error of There+have\has, the university freshmen (Adv) got thehighest error rate of44.6%.The findings of the present study have implications for English teaching andlearning. It is suggested that except the basic pattern There+be+NP+PP, theexposure frequencies of the other three types of EEC in Chinese EFL learners’textbooks and other learning materials should be increased. The difference betweenThere+be+NP+PP and Existential-have sentences should also be stressed inclassroom instruction.