A Study On The Acquisition Of English Reflexive Pronouns For Chinese Junior High School Students

With the development of second language acquisition(SLA)research,great changes have taken place in English instruction approaches.In recent years,it is quite topical to make researches on the acquisition of English reflexives by Chinese learners.However,most of those researches focus on adults or senior English learners,there are few researches on Chinese junior high school students,and most of the existing studies carries out empirical research by taking English proficiency as a variable.However,English Teaching in junior high schools of China varies as grades vary.Therefore,this thesis takes grade as a variable to study the acquisition of English reflexive pronouns for Chinese junior high school students from the first language transfer,accessibility of Universal Grammar(UG),possibility of parameter reset,as well as the applicability of modified binding theory so as to guide the English teaching design of reflexive pronouns in junior high school of China.This thesis,based on White's classical truth judgment model,conducts an empirical study of English reflexive pronouns.The control group includes 30 Australian native speakers,and the experimental group consists of 102 students in grade one,grade two and grade three from a junior high school in Hunan Province.Based on the standard binding theory and modified binding theory,this thesis adopts SPSS(20.0)together with two-way repeated measure ANOVA and one-way ANOVA analysis,to compare the results obtained from the experimental group and that of the control group.In addition,author uses Excel(2007)to quantitatively analyze the comprehension of English reflexive pronouns in the finite biclausal sentences(local / long-distance constraint),the non-finite biclausal sentences(local / long-distance constraint)and the monoclausal sentences(subject / object constraint),so as to explore the overall changing trend and differences in the subjects' mastery of English reflexive pronouns in the six sentence patterns.The results show that Chinese junior high school students have same subject tendency and locality in the acquisition of English reflexives.Besides,compared with native speakers,Chinese junior high school students are affected and restricted by the UG and Principle and Parameters Theory,which leads to the differences of their constraint characteristics.Moreover,there is no significant difference in the acquisition of reflexive pronouns between the students of grade one and grade two,however,the third-year students has improved significantly in the acquisition of reflexive pronouns and their level is closest to the native language learners.Therefore,it is reasonable to assume that the junior high school students arrive the stage of overcoming the negative transfer of the mother tongue when they are at grade three,whereas the rise of grade is not directly equivalent to the rise of English proficiency level.Finally,the author concludes that the modified binding theory is inadequate to explain the acquisition of English reflexive pronouns for junior high school students.Further research is needed to explain the negative correlation between object constraint and locality,as well as the uncorrelation between long-distance constraint and subject tendency.