Indirect Access To UG:Pro-drop Parameter Resetting In SLA

This thesis aims at exploring whether the pro-drop parameter can be reset in the process of second language acquisition and testifying the accessibility of UG to the second language acquisition. The research subjects are the students who are 18 or 19 years old from Sichuan TOP Vocational Institute of Information and Technology, and the research focus is put on the pro-drop parameter, especially on the typical grammatical property-null-subject. Two main research questions are involved in the study. First, can the characteristics of the pro-drop and non-pro-drop language be instructed to the second language learners and help them to reset the target parameters? Second, do the subjects get indirect access to UG in second language acquisition?At the beginning, this thesis reviews the different hypothesis on the accessibility of UG to the second language acquisition. Owing to different research subjects and research methods, different linguistics share different opinions. And it can be generally concluded as the following three ideas:direct access to UG, indirect access to UG, and no-access to UG.Then, this thesis gives the detailed explanation of an empirical experiment conducted in this research. In the research, the 40 subjects who are 18 or 19 years old are non-English majors chosen randomly in grade one in TOP institute. And all the subjects are divided into two groups (experiment group and control group). At first, a pre-test is conducted in both experiment group and control group. In the pretest, both grammaticality judgment task and translation task are involved. The former includes 20 English sentences with 8 of them being ungrammatical in English because of null-subject. The latter includes 10 Chinese sentences. In the following four weeks, the subjects in experiment group are instructed the relevant knowledge of pro-drop parameter. After that the both groups have the post-test which is designed in same difficulty as that in pre-test. Finally, statistic method is applied to the analysis of data collecting in the experiment. And the comparison is made among 4 groups, namely, pre-test and post-test in experiment group, pre-test in the experiment group and pre-test in the control group, pre-test and post-test in the control group, and the post-test in the experiment group and post-test in the control group. The results show that there are no significant differences between the experiment group and control group in the pre-test. The results in the pre-test and the post-test of the control group still make no obvious difference. However, after 4 weeks’learning of relative knowledge of pro-drop parameter, the experiment group performs much better in the post-test than in the pre-test. And the results of the post-test in control group and experiment group show remarkable differences between them.At last, based on the results, this thesis draws the conclusion that pro-drop parameter can be reset and second language learners can get indirect access to the Universal Grammar. And some implications on teaching English for the non-English majors in TOP institute have also been mentioned.