A Survey Of Chinese Middle School Students On The Acquisition Of English Raising Verbs

Among the English verbs that Chines middle school students learned, English raising verbs are a special part of the English verbs. In syntax, raising is the special construction in which an argument that belongs to an embedded predicate is realized syntactically as a dependent of a higher predicate verb. Due to this special syntactic and semantic structure,both in theoretical research and empirical research, it has attracted widely attentions from domestic scholars, as well as international ones. However, the domestic study of the difficulties of the Chinese learners on English raising verbs is rarely studied(Xie Yuanhua,2009,2014). Therefore, this paper attempts to make a survey about the English raising verbs among Chinese middle school students.This study raises three research questions:(1) Do Chinese middle school students distinguish English raising verb from English control verb?(2) Are Chinese middle school students sensitive to the semantic and syntactic feature of English raising verb?(3) Through the regression model, are the focuses useful to predict the acquisition of Chinese middle school students effectively?To answer the above questions, the author adopted Grammatical Judgement Task(GJT)questionnaire to investigate 70 participants’ acquisition about English raising verb. This questionnaire contains 46 test sentences and 20 fillers. According to the scores of junior high school entrance examination, participants are divided into two proficiency levels, 35 students at each level. The statistical method of t test, ANOVA and multiple linear regression was adopted in the data with the help of SPSS 17.The data analysis shows that:(1) Chinese middle school students can distinguish between English raising verb and control verb;(2) Due to overgeneralization and fossilization,Chinese middle school students are not sensitive to the semantic and syntactic features of English raising verb;(3) Test1 in GJT can predict the acquisition of Chinese middle school students effectively.These findings shed light on foreign language teaching and learning. Firstly, teachersshould focus on the explanation about the semantic and syntactic structure of English raising verbs; secondly, teachers should provide some material of English raising verbs as training tasks; lastly, we need to correct the mistakes that students always make in the process of learning English raising verbs.