The Acquisition Of Chinese Equal Comparative Structure By English-speaking Learners

Although equal comparative sentences seem simple to be acquired, from the previous teaching experience and the research results, non-Chinese native learners cannot acquire this structure absolutely, even make various of errors. Most research focus on differential comparative structure, rather than the problems appear in the equal comparative structure. This paper focuses on the difficulties and errors analysis of L2 learners in acquiring Chinese equal comparative structure, summing up the errors that the L2 learners have made or might occur from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, language transfer, language generalization and the acquisition mechanism on the basis of Universal Grammar and Interface Hypothesis. The aim of research is by investigating the acquisition cases of intermediate, advanced and near-native Chinese learners, to figure out whether they could acquire this Chinese structure like native speakers, and to summarize the errors and problems appear during the acquisition, analyzing the reasons behind the errors. By collecting language corpus, figuring out the characteristics, the order and the errors of acquisition, to make up a feasible system and strategy of teaching equal comparative construction, and apply those in the teaching practice preferably.Each language has the expression of comparison, in Chinese, there are several ways to express comparison, generally can be divided into three types:equal comparative comparison, discrepant comparison and extreme comparison. Chinese equal comparison is always described as "he/gen", "xiang", "you" structures. Although in English, equal comparison can be translated as "as…as…", Chinese equal comparative constructions with "he/gen", "xiang", "you" also have some differences in their semantic, syntactic and pragmatic domains. Second language learners in the acquisition of Chinese equal comparative structure not only need to acquire semantic, grammatical interface, also pragmatical interface, and the intersection of semantics, syntax and pragmatics interface.This paper will first raise the concept of equal comparative construction and the problems need to discuss, and analyze the research significance of equal comparative structure according to the materials, syllabus and the acquisition status of L2 learners. Then the paper expounds the bottleneck hypothesis, mapping theory, interface hypothesis as well as the mapping theory, and discuss the current research status from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic scope, error research, the order and process of acquisition, teaching research, interface research.The main content is about the investigation of the acquisition of equal comparison. First part elaborates the survey participants (Chinese learners from the University of Sheffield and Nanjing University whose mother tongue is English), reference materials (previous materials, syllabus and questionnaire), the form of survey (questionnaire), investigation procedure and evaluation criteria. Then illustrates the results of the survey from the acceptance, accuracy, frequency of use etc.Another important point is about the comparative research of equal comparison and error analysis. The paper inducts the structure of equal comparison, the differences between Chinese and English, and the subtle differences between the grammar, semantic, pragmatic scopes of Chinese expression "he/gen", "xiang" and "you", analyzing the reasons of errors from the mutual infection of the usage, the effect of teaching materials and the special mechanism of second language learning. According to the analysis before, processing difficulties of L2 learners in integrating different types of information referring to different domains is one of the most important factors behind this weaker competence than native speakers, which is also one of the most important factors of SLA. Most language items involving simple L1 transfer can be acquired, however, language referred to L2 overgeneralization or the combination of both may not be acquired.On the base of the results of survey, focusing on the problems appear, this paper will make a teaching design about the equal comparison. First it would describe the teaching sequence of material and the outline, and bring up some constructive teaching strategies of equal comparison. Then it will make a simple teaching plan and teaching design of the equal comparative sentences.What’s more, this article is based on an ideal condition, the difficulty L2 learners meet when processing different kinds of information of different scopes might be influenced by multiple interfaces, the teaching design and suggests need further test by teaching practice as well.