An Empirical Study Of Acquisition Of English Ditransitive Constructionby Chinese EFL Learners

The thesis attempts to investigate acquisition of English ditransitive construction by Chinese EFL learnerswithin the framework of Compensation Hypothesis in second language acquisition. According to this Compensation Hypothesis, in the process of learning a foreign language, ifcontextual knowledge offoreign language corresponding to its linguistic form is absent or lacking, contextual knowledge ofmother tongue may interfere and mismatch with that linguistic form, thus influencing appropriate and fluent use of second language.An empirical study of acquisition of English ditransitive construction was conducted in this thesis. Freshmen in a university were chosen assubjects of an experimental group(EG) and a control group(CG) in the present empirical study. Subjects from the two groups underwent a twelve-week comparative teaching experiment. Before the commencement of the present teaching experiment, a pre-test was conducted on the two groups to examine subjects’ mastering of English ditransitive construction. After this twelve-week teaching experiment, a post-test was also carried out on the two groups, in order to examine whether there existed any significant difference in subjects’ acquisition of English ditransitive construction. The data were analyzed by SPSS 20.0 after being collected in the pre-test and post-test. Results ofthe pre-test indicated that there was no significant difference in subjects’ acquisition of English ditransitive construction and that subjects made errors in using this construction possibly because of contextual knowledge compensation of mother tongue. Results ofthe post-test indicated that after this teaching experiment, subjects’ internal contextual knowledge of foreign language was increased in the experimental group and that contextual knowledge compensation of mother tongue was largely avoided because subjects received reinforcement to practice English ditransitive construction repetitively. Therefore, subjectsin the experimental groupcan use English ditransitive construction more accurately and appropriately. In addition, the teaching materials on English ditransitive construction in the experiment group and control group were mainly fromtextbook and other materials on this constructionfrom extracurricular books were also received in the experimental group.This study offered some suggestions on teaching and learning concerning English ditransitive construction. More specifically,foreign language teachers shall give full play to the context in teaching and provide abundant, accurate contextual knowledge of foreign language. In addition, in the process of acquiring contextual knowledge, students should change their role as passive receivers and display their own initiative and enthusiasm to learn theircontextual knowledge.