A Study On The Acquisition Of The Adverb "Zai" In Native English Speakers

The adverb "Zai" in Chinese is frequently used in Chinese,however to native English speakers,there is a difficulty in acquisition due to its complexity.In previous studies of the adverb "Zai",previous scholars mostly focused on the difference between the meanings of "Zai" and "You" and "Hai".However,they seldom discussed this acquisition of “Zai” using methods of cross-linguistic contrastive analysis that took the perspective of second-language acquisition.The aim of this study intends to discuss this.Based on the theories of corpus linguistics,comparative analysis theory,and universal grammar theory,this paper used the 2 million-word Dynamic Corpus of Foreigners' writing in CSL-DCFW corpus and questionnaires,examined the situation in which native English speakers learned "Zai",including the output situation,the acquisition order,the types and causes of errors,the teaching status,etc.And found that the most commonly used meaning was "repetition",which is the same as the output of native Chinese speakers.The order of acquisition can be roughly divided into three categories.Firstly,is T1(repetition)and T2(deferred)which are the easier learned terms.Secondly,is T5(incremental)and T3(significant changes)which are the more difficult terms to be learned.Thirdly,is T4(deepen)the most difficult term to learn.On this basis,this paper compared the acquisition status of native English speakers with native Japanese speakers to explore the differences in the acquisition of "Zai" by different native-speaking background learners.This was done in order to compare and summarize the acquisition characteristics of native English speakers.Studies have shown that learners with different native-speaking backgrounds have no significant difference in the order in which they learn the adverb "Zai",proving that Krashen's natural order hypothesis has certain rationality.However,the difference in the learner's native background and their native language have some influence on the errors: compared with Japanese native speakers,English native speakers misalign action verbs and subject verbs.Based on the above research results,this paper first analyzed the causes of errors from the perspective of negative transfer of mother tongue vocabulary usage,words order,and regular pattern of the combination of form and meaning.Then,through questionnaires and interviews,it found that the generalization of target language rules and the infrequent use of metacognitive strategies are also one of the causes of errors.Finally,combined with the survey results of teaching materials(syllabus and commonly used textbooks)and previous research conclusions,this paper suggested that the textbook layout should follow the natural acquisition order and pay attention to the graded teaching according to the acquisition order.