A Study Of Middle School Students' Acquisition Of English Pronoun Under The Delay Of Principle B Effect

In recent years,the study of pronouns has become one of the hot topics in second language acquisition.120 middle school students from Zhangzhou,Fujian Province were taken as subjects,which are from Junior Two,Senior one and Senior Two.The subjects were asked to do a truth value judgement task which are based on pictures.Two-Way ANOVA and three-factor variance analysis of SPSS 20.0 were used to analyze the data to answer the following questions:(1)What is the mean of their acquisition of Principle A of the binding of English reflexive pronoun and Principle B of the binding of the English pronoun? Do the three different grades of middle school students and three types of sentence pattern which includes mono clausal sentence,biclausal finite sentence,and biclausal nonfinite sentence have an interactive effect on the acquisition of English pronouns and reflexive pronouns? With the improvement of English proficiency,are the middle school students' understanding of pronouns and reflexive pronouns significantly improved?(2)Do different grades of middle school students follow the Principle B in the process of pronoun acquisition? If not,is their acquisition of reflexive pronouns significantly better than that of pronouns,that is to say,is there a delay of Principle B effect phenomenon?The results of statistical analysis are as follows:(1)In truth value judgment task,Two-Way ANOVA shows that the average score of the acquisition of pronouns or reflexive pronouns among different grades of students in biclausal finite sentence and biclausal nonfinite sentence is higher than that in monoclausal sentence.The main effect of "group" is significant,F(2,360)=20.809,P=0.000.The main effect of "sentence pattern" is significant,F(2,360)=151.494,P=0.000.Also the interaction effect of “three grades”* “three sentence patterns” is significant,F(4,360)=2.666,P=0.031.(2)The comprehension of pronouns and reflexive pronouns in different grades are as follows: in the three-factor variance analysis of genre*sentence*distance,we find that the main effect of the genre is not significant in Junior Two students,F(1,480)=0.072,P=0.788.In Senior one,the results show that the main effect of the genre is not significant,F(1,480)=0.791,P=0.374.Also in Senior Two,the results show that the main effect of the genre is not significant either,F(1,480)=1.590,P=0.208.From the statistical result above,we can reach the following conclusion:(1)Different grades of the middle school students have significant differences in the mean values of pronouns and reflexive pronouns in monoclausal sentence,biclausal nonfinite sentence and biclausal finite sentence,the mean value in monoclausal finite sentence and biclausal nonfinite sentence is significant higher than that in monoclausal sentence.With the development of their study,the mean value of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexive pronouns increased significantly.Different levels of middle school students and monoclausal sentence,biclausal nonfinite sentence and biclausal finite sentence affect the acquisition of pronouns and reflexive pronouns simultaneously.With the improvement of middle school students' English proficiency,they have significantly improved their acquisition of pronouns and reflexive pronouns.(2)Different grades of middle school students follow the principle B in the process of the acquisition of English pronoun,and their acquisition of English reflexive pronouns is not significantly better than that of English pronouns.The acquisition of pronouns doesn't lag behind that of reflexive pronoun,in other words,there doesn't exist the phenomenon of the Delay of Principle B Effect.Therefore,we suggest that teaching of English pronouns should be based on the current level of the students,the teaching of pronouns should be step by step,guiding students to enhance their awareness of English grammar in the use of language,teachers should pay attention to the differences of the binding condition between English and Chinese and use positive transfer to promote pronoun acquisition,teachers should consciously increase the positive input of pronouns in the second language learning and create the output opportunities of using language and teachers should create the context close to students' life and enhance students' pragmatic awareness.