A Study Of The Chinese Senior High School Students' Learning Of The English Dative Verbs

The acquisition of double object construction has always been the focus of language research for many years.The English dative verb has two structures: the double object construction and the prepositional object construction.The asymmetry and the complexity of the two constructions have always been a difficulty in the second language teaching and learning.Many researchers examined the dative verb mainly from the syntactic structure,semantic transfer and the phonemic or morphological constraints and so on.Many related theories and assumptions have been proposed,but few research is based on the "Narrow Range Rules" proposed by Pinker(1989).Most foreign researches' subjects are adults or children,while domestic researches focus on the English major students.Seldom research uses the high school students as subjects.So this paper asked three different grade students to do the grammatical judgment task to explore high school students' dative alternation acquisition.A questionnaire with four types of dative verbs(push-class?Throw-class?tell-class?and whisper-class dative verb)are used as the grammatical judgment task.Each real or nonce verb respectively contains the DOD and the POD construction.These subjects need to judge the natural of each sentence.The author has used the SPSS21.0 to conduct the2*8 between-subjects ANOVA and the MONOVA analysis.Through data analysis,I have obtained the following findings: Chinese EFL learners are not sensitive to the“Narrow Range Rules”;Over-generalization is observed;there is a significant difference between the two different grades in using different real dative verbs,but the subjects' acquisition of POD is better than the DOD;There is no significant difference between the subjects,but grade two do better than grade one;As for the nonce dative verb,all the students support the DOD and POD constructions.The present study also tells us : Firstly,teachers should provide some positive and negative examples to reduce the rate of the errors caused by the over-generalization in second language acquisition;Secondly,the teacher should focus on the input of the target language and improve its quantity and quality;Besides the teaching of the main parameters of the second language is also necessary.