A Study Of Chinese Efl Learners' Acquisition Of English Expressions Of Caused Motion Event

Motion event is one of the most pervasive events in the cognition of human beings,so research on motion event has been one of the key issues in the field of cognitive linguistics and SLA.At home,however,researchers pay more attention to motion event typology of Chinese.A number of studies on English motion event acquisition so far have focused on voluntary motion event,but there have been few studies on caused motion event specifically.As a result,the present study aims to explore the following three questions:(1)What are the characteristics of English expressions of caused motion event acquired by Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency?(2)What are the developmental patterns of Chinese EFL learners' English expressions of caused motion event?(3)Does L1 thinking-for-speaking pattern affect the acquisition of Chinese EFL learners' English expressions of caused motion event?Based on Talmy's typological framework and Slobin's thinking-for-speaking hypothesis,this study recruited 90 Chinese EFL learners with different English proficiency and they were divided into three groups equally,and 30 English native speakers who are college students from Brock University of Canada were acted as the control group.This study used 24 pictures that show caused motion events to elicit participants to describe the actions in written form.Then,data produced by participants were coded,and tokens and types of cause verbs and satellites were counted.Besides,the percentage of descriptions of a particular physical setting and the mean value of ground information distribution were counted as well.Finally,the results were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics,ANOVA and multiple comparisons in SPSS 16.0.There are three major findings in this thesis:(1)Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency show different characteristics in the acquisition of English expressions of caused motion event.Primary learners acquire English expressions of caused motion event at a low stage;intermediate learners try to put what they have acquired into use,and they are similar to advanced learners in the usage of English cause verbs,satellites,physical setting and distribution of ground information but different from caused motion event expressions produced by native speakers;advanced learners are similar to native speakers in the output of tokens of English cause verbs and satellites,but their output of types of English cause verbs and satellites are significantly fewer than native speakers',and they describe more physical settings than native speakers,and the distribution of Goal information in advanced group are more than English native speakers.(2)There is no pattern to follow in the acquisition of English expressions of caused motion event of primary learners.When Chinese EFL learners achieve intermediate English proficiency,they start to show a stable pattern that is similar to advanced learners.However,intermediate learners' acquisition has not been fixed,and they tend to be more native-like.When they are at advanced level,there still be space for the improvement of English expressions of caused motion event.(3)Chinese L1 “thinking-for-speaking” patterns do affect Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English expressions of caused motion event.The “BA construction”,“JIANG construction” and “SHI construction” lead Chinese EFL learners to use more “let do” and “make do” constructions.Besides,influenced by the Chinese noun expression “huo zai”,Chinese EFL learners describe the particular physical setting in a static way.Furthermore,Chinese L1's affection of arrival of the Figure contributes to Chinese EFL learners' too many descriptions of Goal information.The implications of this study are both theoretical and pedagogical.Theoretically,the present study contributes to showing the characteristics of English expressions of caused motion event acquired by Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels and enriches the the research on caused motion events.Pedagogically,based on the findings,there can be different approaches to improving Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English expressions of caused motion event respectively.