Aspect Hypothesis And The Use Of English Progressive By Chinese EFL Learners

The system of tense and aspect is an important part for second language acquisition, and it is also difficult for language learners to master. Aspect Hypothesis, one of the most important theoretical achievements, proposed by Andersen and Shirai in1996, attracted many linguists did lots of researches from different perspectives. Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds(1965) have tested the first item of Aspect Hypothesis by using cloze test, and Cai Jinting(2002) tested the four items of Aspect Hypothesis. Most of the previous researches support the Aspect Hypothesis, while some don’t. The other studies explored relation between the effect of Aspect Hypothesis and learners’proficiency levels, such as Robinson’s and Cai jinting’s, but there were different results. Although there are lots of researches, only a small number of them study EFL learners, and not so many researchers pay attention to the third and fourth items of the Aspect Hypothesis:③Progressive marking is initially restricted to activity verbs and then extended to accomplishments and achievements;④Progressive marking is not incorrectly overextended to states.(Andersen&Shirai1996:559)In order to test whether the acquisitions of progressive aspect of Chinese learners agree with the third and fourth items of the Aspect Hypothesis and find out the relation between the effect of Aspect Hypothesis and learners’ proficiency levels, the present research tries to answer the following three questions:1)To what extent does students’ acquisition of progressive aspect agree with the third item of the Aspect Hypothesis?2)Will Chinese students make mistakes in progressive markings? If there are any mistakes, what are they?3)Do high level learners demonstrate any difference in Close Test designed to test the effect of Aspect Hypothesis? If so, what are the specific differences?The present thesis collects data from writing and cloze tests of Chinese learners. SPSS19.0is applied to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics and Independent Samples T-test are used. The author’s major findings are offered as follows: 1) The sequence of the acquisition of progressive aspect of high-level learners supports the third item of Aspect Hypothesis, and the development and sequence is as follows:activities> accomplishments> achievements> states. However, learners of low proficiency level use much more achievements than accomplishments, so the development and sequence for them is as follows:activities> achievements> accomplishments> states.2) The acquisition of progressive aspect of learners of high proficiency level basically supports the fourth item of Aspect Hypothesis. To be specific, they do not overextend progressive markings to states. And learners of low proficiency level overextend progressive markings to states, so the acquisition of progressive aspect of learners of low proficiency level does not support the fourth item of the Aspect Hypothesis.3) Compared with learners of low proficiency level, learners of high proficiency level have a better understanding of English tense and aspect system, and the effect of Aspect Hypothesis is more obvious.This thesis has proved the universality of the third item of Aspect Hypothesis. The findings of this study have the following pedagogical implications:1) Teachers need to emphasize the prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of progressive aspect:the prototypical meaning of progressive aspect is to describe that the action is in the process of progress, and the use of progressive aspect to the related verbs is non-prototypical:learners should focus on both memorization of irregular progressive markings and the rules for application on regular progressive aspect;2) the acquisition of progressive aspect can be introduced to students from the perspective of semantic features of verbs, because different semantic features decide their connections with different kinds of aspects and tense; learners should concern the effect of lexical aspect of verbs on tense and aspect;3) it’s necessary to maintain further focus on grammar in the teaching to avoid any possible Chinese interference, such as Chinese way of thinking, and the negative transfer of Chinese tense and aspect system; learners should establish the system of English grammar.