A Study Of The Acquisition Of English Passives By Chinese College Students Based On The Processability Theory

The processing of language information has always been the core concept of second language acquisition theory.Processability uses Levelt's speech model components to explore the development or presentation of learner grammar.It also clarifies the prerequisites necessary for the acquisition of grammatical rules at different stages by means of Lexical Functional Grammar,creating a language acquisitional hierarchy.Pienemann and Johnson have applied the processing hierarchy to native English learners in Spanish and Polish.The majority of the SLA studies mainly adopted error analysis,using written data to investigate English passive sentences in Chinese,which were not much revelation to the spontaneous generation of passive constructions of learners.This paper aims to explore the English passive construction acquisition order for the Chinese students.The picture description task was firstly conducted to verify whether the Chinese college students' English acquisition process conforms to the assumption of Processability Theory,that is,every subordinate resource is a prerequisite for a higher level and L2 learners must complete each stage in turn.Subsequently,through Fishfilm and Slideshow,the Chinese college students with different English proficiency level were compared in the acquisition of psychological passive verbs and agentive verbs.The experimental results are statistically analyzed by using SPSS software,and the differences between the two types of passive constructions acquisition are interpreted from the perspective of Processability Theory.The results show that the English acquisition process of Chinese college students is consistent with the hypothesis of Processability Theory.In other words,language production is an increasing process,and the processing program is gradually activated.From the results of speech onset latency in the FishFilm task,compared with more proficient learners,the process of establishing passives is more difficult than actives and requires much more time to generate passives for less proficient learners.Less proficient learners would have a greater gap between the time required to generate passive and active sentences.As the L2 proficiency level of learners' increases,they become more automatized with less additional processing costs associated with passive constructions.The sequence of psychological and agentive passives for Chinese college students is as follows,(1)Agentive Passives:Adversative Passives>Non-adversative Passives,(2)Agentive Passives>Psychological Passives,(3)Psychological Passives:EO Passives>ES Passives.Learners of different English proficiency adopt alternative strategies,but with the improvement of English proficiency,the active sentences decline,and the strategies involved in non-canonical mapping will increase.