On The Acquisition Of Chinese A-Not-A Questions By Indian CSL Learners

A-not-A question is a special question pattern in Chinese,and its [+Q] feature is realized through reduplicating the predicate element of an A-not-A question.In the process of teaching Chinese,A-not-A question is a difficult point for both CSL(Chinese as Second Language)teachers and CSL learners.Especially for English speaking Indian leaners of Chinese as a second language(Indian CSL leaners),they think that Chinese is difficult and Chinese A-not-A question is one of the most difficult points in the process of learning Chinese,because no matter in their mother languages(Hindi,Tamil,ect.)or in their official language(English),there are no such equivalents as Chinese Anot-A questions.Therefore,it's rather difficult for Intermediate Indian CSL to acquire the rich forms and the complex structure of A-not-A question.Even if some Indian CSL learners can understand and read Chinese A-not-A questions,they still cannot avoid making errors,such as overgeneralization,addition error,avoidance error,mixture error,ect.Moreover,intermediate Indian CSL learners have selection bias in using the four sub-types of A-not-A questions: A-not-A,A-not-AB(type A),A-not-AB(type B)and AB-not-A.The possible explanation for such phenomena might be that Indian CSL leaners' output of A-not-A questions were affected by various factors: native speakers language habits,language features of Indian CSL leaners' mother language and official language,CSL teachers' teaching methods,CSL learners learning methods and habits,and the teaching materials.The present study explores the acquisition of A-not-A questions by intermediate Indian CSL learners based on relevant theories from the areas of syntax and SLA.The 30 participants of the test group are Indian students from Jinan University,and the participants of the control group are 30 native English majors of the same age.Based on Xu & Tian's reduplication(±deletion)approach for A-not-A questions,three tasks are designed to collect instant linguistic data.The three tasks are acceptability judgment task,English-Chinese translation and Look-and-Say task.After the collection of linguistic data,the statistical and analytical software IBM SPSS Statistics 22 is used to perform statistical analysis.And the results of the present study show some enlightenments to CSL teaching and the compilation of teaching material.For instance,CSL teachers should not only pay attention to the input of a language point but also attach importance to the output of it;to encourage and lead students to correctly use the language in real situation.CSL leaners should be involved and dare to speak target language both in class and in daily life;to be open-minded to the corrections from others.And the teaching material should be compiled for the purpose of improving CSL learners' communicative competence;to create diverse real situations for students to practice.In addition,the current research also has a certain contribution to the theoretical research on second language acquisition.This study provided an empirical evidence for the proposal that ‘Focus on form'(FonF)is a central construct in taskbased language teaching.