On The Acquisition Of English Indirect Speech

English indirect speech is of great importance in senior high school's English learning and teaching.The existing researches on indirect speech in English mainly focus on the mutual conversion between direct speech and indirect speech.During the mutual transformation process,a series of transformation rules of personal pronoun,tense,demonstrative,verb,temporal adverbial,adverbial of place,questions and imperative sentence are involved,which are complex and abstract enough that English learners may feel difficult and boring to learn English indirect speech.In addition,much attention is paid to the normal high school students' English direct-indirect transformation other than that of visually impaired(VI,henceforth)high school students.Therefore,it is particularly necessary to go into the VI high school students' English indirect speech acquisition.This paper aims to examine VI Senior One high school students' proficiency of English direct-indirect speech transformation so as to pave the way for the further investigation of their acquisition features and learning difficulties.Specifically speaking,adopting the Senior One high school students both in Wuhan No.14 Middle School and Wuhan Blind School as the research participants,the paper first go into their mastery of English direct-indirect transformation with the help of according testing paper designed by the author.Then based on the test results,a comparative and an error analysis are adopted to find out two learning groups' error types and their similarities and difficulties during their acquiring English indirect speech so as to further embody the visually handicapped high school students' acquisition features and learning difficulties.In the end,the author interviews the Senior One high school English teacher in Wuhan Blind School with a view to further studying the VI senior high school students' learning difficulties.All these methods are conducive to a meaningful study,which is embodied in the following aspects:1)The study contributes to getting insight to the VI Senior One high school students' acquisition law of English indirect speech;2)The study contributes to the discovery of the VI students' errors they have made during their acquiring English indirect speech;3)The study contributes to providing theoretical reference for the VI students'English learning and teaching and promoting English teaching reform ultimately.Through the research,it has been found that normal and VI Senior One high school students have both similarities and differences in the course of acquiring English indirect speech.The common point is that they both tend to make more errors in simple questions(SQ),Wh-questions(WH),tense(T),imperative sentences(Imp)and temporal adverbials(TA)during their acquiring English direct-indirect transformation.The difference finds its impression in the aspect that the VI Senior One high school students are less proficient of the English direct-indirect transformation than the normal students.In addition,VI students' error rates on transformation knowledge points differ from the normal ones'.As for normal Senior One high school students,their error rates from high to low are:Imp(83%)>WH(67%)>SQ(66%)>Tense(31%)>TA(30%)>Verb(23%)>PP(personal pronoun,15%)>Dem(demonstrative,8%)>AP(adverbials of places,0%).In terms of the VI Senior One high school students,their error rates from high to low are:SQ(100%)>WH(70.08%)>Imp(56.67%)>TA(53.27%)>PP(50%)>T(38.89%)>Verb(33.34%)=Dem>AP(17%).Thus,it is easily concluded that VI Senior One high school students feel more difficult in acquiring English indirect speech compared with the normal ones.Additionally,for an insightful interpretation of the VI students'learning difficulties,the paper adopts the interview to further investigate.And the results show that the learning difficulties the VI students encounter mainly derive from the 'following four aspects:1)The society pays less attention to the providing of the diversified English learning resources.2)The blind school attaches less importance to the improvement of the visually impaired students' awareness of English learning as well as the creation of a good,active and intense atmosphere of English learning for the blind students.It is rare to see that abundant books,newspapers,novels or magazines in relation to English learning are printed in Braille and provided.In addition,limited English teachers are recruited by school.3)From the visually impaired students' viewpoint,they suffer a lot from visual impairment and fail to the lack of the learning motivation and the inappropriate learning style give rise to their difficulty in learning English.4)From the teachers' perspective,shortage of the second language acquisition and teaching idea causes trouble in the visually impaired students' English learning.