A Corpus-based Study On The Acquisition Of If-conditionals

Conditionals are assumed that they exist in every human language.Their unique semantic meaning,syntactic structure and function have drawn great attention.Reviewing on the previous research over the past years,many researchers in the field of Language Acquisition are also devoted to the studies.They found that the acquisition of English conditionals has long time been a weak point for ESL/EFL learners.Besides,because of the abundant data and the context,the emerging corpus-based approach is able to present the language acquisition of conditionals more objectively.As a result,English conditionals and corpus-based approach are picked out to carry out the research and thus provide accurate suggestions for teaching and researching practice.The thesis is a corpus-based study on the acquisition of English if-conditionals.The objects for analysis and discussion were selected from the two corpora,NESSIE V2 and the CLEC(ST3+ST4)respectively.Base on the theories of interlanguage,Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and computer-aided error analysis,the research was conducted quantitatively and qualitatively.It was carried out basically in three major steps: fist,the selection of data.With the help of MS Word,after the time-consuming manual selection and elimination,all the if-conditionals were classified into four types,factual conditionals,predictive conditionals,hypothetical conditionals and counterfactual conditionals,which were tagged with “t1”,“t2”,“t3”,“t4” respectively.The second step is to normalize the data that have already been collected and a study for comparison was followed.The third step is to analyze the errors committed and find out the possible causes.MS Word and SPSS were applied to this study for statistics.There are two main findings: first,concerning the application of English if-conditionals compared with the native speakers,there is a significant difference between the occurrences of if-conditionals of certain types.Chinese EFL learners tend to use much more if-conditionals in their compositions to express their will.When it comes to the four types,learners are inclined to underuse factual conditionals and hypothetical conditionals as well as overusing predictive conditionals.At the same time,there is not a significant difference between the applications of counterfactual conditionals.What' more,the unique differences also exist in the learners at the two different levels in the study.In addition,the similar tendency to use if-conditionals is showed between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers.Second,there were not many tense-aspect errors committed by Chinese EFL learners in if-conditionals.Interlingual factors,intralingual factors and induced factors all contribute to the characteristics of interlanguage.According to the findings of the research,some suggestions are made: firstly,teachers must make sure that the grammatical item is acceptable to learners and take the learners' proficiency into consideration.Secondly,teachers can adopt task-based language teaching approach when they teach.Finally,corpora can be a powerful tool to support the teaching process.There are some limitations too.First,the influences of different language backgrounds are not taken into consideration.Second,diachronic studies and research on oral production are not covered,so are full analyses of possible causes of frequencies and errors.Third,the identification of if-conditionals is relatively subjective.This thesis also provides advice from mainly three aspects for further research:(1)The influence of different language backgrounds should be analyzed and discussed.(2)Diachronic studies and studies on oral production should be carried out.(3)Interlanguage features of if-conditionals can be explored further based on other classifications.