A Study On The Asymmetry In Chinese ESL Learners' Negative Expressions Comprehension

Under the framework of markedness theory,the present study uses empirical approaches to investigate whether there is an asymmetry among different kinds of English negative expressions in Chinese ESL learners' comprehension.In order to explore the current situation of negation comprehension in SLA,38 Chinese ESL learners,who are divided into two different levels of English proficiency,are tested through the self-paced reading experiment and the interview task experiment,which are conducted by E-Prime 2.0 and Power Point 2007.And the data of the results is analyzed by IBM SPSS Statistics 19.0.At last,we discuss the results within the dual hierarchy and context suppression,based on the markedness theory.The present study has found that there exists an actual asymmetry among different kinds of English negative expressions in Chinese ESL learners' comprehension.The main findings:(1)for Chinese ESL learners,the markedness differences within the negative category are graded as “pragmatic negation < explicit negation(direct negative words < indirect negative words)< implicit negation”,the degree of markedness increases progressively from left to right,and in pragmatics,the hierarchical constraint of negation comprehension is manifested as the suppression of context.That finding indicates that the differences of form-meaning mapping among negative markers can not predict the ESL learners' acquisition sequence of negative expressions,and in the aspect of human cognition,the level of pragmatic constraint is higher than that of syntactic constraint;(2)the efficiency and accuracy of the negation comprehension in the advanced group are higher than that in the lower intermediate group.It is obvious that for Chinese ESL learners,the understanding and the processing of the English negative expressions are restricted by the level of their English proficiency,which shows that the higher level do much better than the lower level;(3)without any contexts,the correct rate of explicit negation is slightly lower than that of implicit negation in the advanced group.That finding shows that it is a spiral process to develop the capability of negation comprehension.With the development of the learners' second language capability,the influence of context suppression is gradually increasing,and the processing of negative expressions is deeper and deeper,thus the accuracy is affected;(4)there have been variations in the processing of implicit negation,as the negative structure “too… to…” possesses small singular values both in the advanced group and the lower intermediate group.The finding implies that the intervention of pedagogy may have an important effect on the extraction and comprehension of the English negative expressions.The comprehension problem of English negative expressions is one of the foundations of promoting ESL learners' English reading and comprehension.The asymmetry in Chinese ESL learners' negative expression understanding is attributed to four factors: the different degrees of salience of the negative markers in English,the different levels of English proficiency of the Chinese ESL learners,the different degrees of pragmatic constraint and syntactic constraint and the different degrees of teaching intervention to various negative expressions,especially in primary and secondary education.English teachers could help students develop their English reading and comprehension ability from those four factors mentioned above.