The Acquisition Of English Middle Construction By English Learners In China

The word “middle” is a classification of the voice,which is between the active voice and the passive voice,so it is also called “middle voice” or “middle construction”.Because of the special syntactic and semantic features of English Middle Construction(EMC),it has brought difficulties for foreign language learners,which widely arouse scholars concern and discussion.In the previous researches,scholars devote themselves to the research of its generative mechanisms and there are mainly two schools: lexical generation(Fagan,1988;Ackema &Schoorlemmer,1995)and syntactic generation(Keyser&Roeper,1984;Stroik,1992,1995,1999).In the aspect of empirical research,although many empirical investigations have been done before,they all focus on the comparative research between the high school students and the college students and they have not inferred to three groups,namely non-English major undergraduate students,English major undergraduate students and English major postgraduate students.The previous research has not explored the differences and difficulties in the acquisition of EMC.With the appearance of the theory of the Interface Hypothesis(IH),it has brought light to the field of the Foreign language research.This thesis is trying to make use of the semantic restrictions of IH to reveal the difficulties in acquiring EMC among the different groups of students in Shanxi Normal University and provides implications and suggestions for both learners and teachers in further researches.According to the above research objectives,this thesis includes two research questions:(1)Is Chinese English learners' acquisition level of EMC related with their English proficiency among non-English major undergraduate students,English major undergraduate students and English major postgraduate students?(2)What are the differences among the three groups in the acquisition of subject,middle verb and adjunct? Which part is easier to acquire for them?An empirical research was done in order to answer these questions.The research subjects areall from Shanxi Normal University,including 44 non-English major undergraduate students,47 English major undergraduate students and 32 English major postgraduate students are involved in this research.Research instrument is the Acceptability Judgment Task(AJT)questionnaire that all subjects have completed in the required time.The English final test scores and the college entrance examination scores are adopted to divide each groups into different score sections,which are also used to show their English proficiency.In the end,the collected statistics are analyzed by SPSS 22.0.The result has shown that(1)Chinese English learners' acquisition of EMC is positively related with their English proficiency.(2)Non-English major undergraduate students' performances on EMC are not as good as the other groups.English major undergraduate students have a better understanding on the acquisition of the restriction of subject and middle verb,while English major postgraduate students prefer the acquisition of the adjunct and performance well.As for the grammatical EMC,Chinese English learners have the basic abilities to identify it.The above research results provide implications for language teaching and learning.For English learners,they should strengthen their general English knowledge and improve their acquisition of semantic restrictions on EMC.For English teachers,they should improve the teaching methods to help students acquire the semantic restrictions on EMC in teaching rather than simply asking students to memorize the individual words or sentence patterns.