The Acquisition Of English Progressive Aspect By Chinese Learners

The acquisition of tense and aspect has always been the focus of previous studies in the field of SLA. In recent years, the influence of lexical aspect on the acquisition of grammatical aspect has come to a wide discussion. However, previous studies have seldom investigated the influence of lexical aspect on the acquisition of English grammatical aspect by Chinese learners. The present study is to investigate the acquisition of English progressive aspect marker -ing by Chinese learners. Its main focus is on the effect of lexical aspect on the acquisition of grammatical aspect (English progressive marker in this study). The aspect hypothesis and the prototype hypothesis are tested through examining the production data from CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) and comprehension data from a grammaticality judgment test. The research questions are as follows:1) How does lexical aspect affect the production of English progressive marker by Chinese learners?2) How does lexical aspect and adverbials affect the comprehension of English progressive marker by Chinese learners?3) How does learners' proficiency level affect the acquisition of English progressive marker?The corpora ST5 (freshman English majors) and ST6 (senior English majors) of CLEC were chosen as the production data. In the grammaticality judgment test, the participants are college students from Hunan University, including 30 freshmen English majors and senior English majors. SPSS 19.0 is employed to analyze the results. The following are the conclusions of the present study:1) The production of English progressive marker is strongly connected with lexical aspects. For both freshmen and seniors as English majors, the frequency of four lexical aspect types in the corpora is in an obvious hierarchy, activities> accomplishments> achievements> statives. The results are in support of the aspect hypothesis.2) After analyzing the GJT results, it is found that lexical aspect also affects the comprehension of English progressive marker among Chinese learners, for both groups accept the progressive meanings with a significant hierarchy of lexical aspects, activities> achievements> statives. The comprehension results also agree with the aspect hypothesis. Certain adverbials also affect comprehension of progressive marking. The results of the senior group totally3) consist with the prediction of the prototype account, with the acceptance in a sequence of Process(Activity)> habitual/futurate> stative progressive. But the freshman group shows a acceptance sequence of Process(Activity)> futurate> habitual/stative progressive, which does not consist with the prototype hypothesis.4) The two proficiency levels (freshman and senior English majors) only have a little influence on the acquisition of progressive marking in English. Senior English are more affected by lexical aspect than freshmen English majors in progressive aspect marking while classroom instruction may exert more influence on the learners with lower proficiency level.