Unlearning Of Topic-prominence By Chinese Learners Of English

As is universally acknowledged that “English is a subject-prominent language and Chinese is a topic-prominent language”(Li & Thompson,1976),many differences are lying between these two languages.The present research is carried out to investigate the topic prominence constructions during acquisition of English by EFL(English foreign language)learners with the help of judgment test.The research recruited three groups of participants who are high school students,college freshmen and postgraduate students,representing three English proficiency levels.The research focuses on the effect of different types of topic-comment constructions and topic marker on participants? acceptance of topic-comment constructions.It is found through this study that Chinese learners for English can unlearn the topicalizations and the types or topic markers have effect on participants? acceptance of topic-comment constructions.To be more specific,Chinese EFL learners accept movement-derived topics better than base-generated topics,especially those with comma after topic and with noun phrase related to the topic serving as subject in the comment.However when learners English proficiency improves,they are more sensitive to the target language they acquire as second language and accept the English topics to a lower degree.Regarding the theoretical framework of the Typology Transfer,the Topic-to-Subject Hypothesis and the Hierarchy of Difficulty Hypothesis,the findings of the present research help further the understanding of Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage developing from topic prominence to subject prominence.Besides,the results of the current research are beneficial for English teaching in China.English teachers are suggested to enhance the comparison between English and Chinese so as to help learners be more conscious of the difference so as to avoid errors.