Correlation Study Between The Input Of Information On English Middle Construction And Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Middle Construction

Descriptive and empirical studies of English middle construction(henceforth EMC)finds that many learners have difficulty in acquiring such construction,which is attributed to the syntactic complexity and semantic peculiarity.Some studies have been conducted on the EFL learners' acquisition of EMC,but less is known about the role that the information input may play in the acquisition of EMC,as such,the influence of the information input remains to be scrutinized.To contribute to this point,this thesis explores the correlation between the information on EMC and Chinese EFL learners' acquisition.This study,via quantitative analysis,selects two groups of English learners with different English levels to take part in the survey.They are senior high school students as elementary learners and university freshmen as intermediate learners respectively.And four kinds of information on the six target English middle verbs are adopted: constraints on NP,constraints on AP,examples of EMC and combination of three kinds of information on EMC.By controlling English proficiency,the correlation between information on EMC and the acquisition of different kinds of EMC is explored,and controlling the input information on EMC,the correlation between the English proficiency and the acquisition of different kinds of EMC is also explored.The following conclusions are drawn from analysis.First of all,the constraints on AP are more conducive to the acquisition of variant type of EMC compared with the constraints on NP,but the effects of these two kinds of information on the acquisition of prototypical type of EMC are not statistically different.Therefore,the Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of different types of EMC varies with different kinds of information on EMC.Secondly,when learners consult examples of EMC,English proficiency exerts no significant effect on the acquisition of EMC.However,when they consult the other three kinds of information,the marked impact of English proficiency on the acquisition aligns with previous result that the higher the English proficiency,the better the acquisition.Striking differences result from English proficiency can be found in the acquisition of variant type of EMC rather than the acquisition of prototypical type of EMC.Thirdly,examples of EMC can help improve the production of the EMC in a better way when the other variables are the same.Furthermore,when learning EMC,the learners referring to examples of EMC acquire better than those referring to combination of three kinds of information,which reveals that it is not true that the more information the learners get,the better they acquire.Taken all together,this study,to some extent,makes a contribution to the enrichment of empirical studies on the acquisition of EMC.And these findings are very informative for second language teaching and provide certain enlightenment for bilingual dictionary compilation.