The English AUX--with implications for teaching English to Chinese ESL learners

Sensing the scarcity of research on the controversial status of AUX with reference to Chinese, and assuming that some of the most troublesome problems in learning English come from the English AUX system, this thesis reviews studies done to date on Chinese linguistics and summarizes the debate over the status of AUX; it examines syntactic evidence against an overtly realized AUX in Chinese by applying syntactic arguments about AUX to Chinese modals; it makes a detailed analysis of semantic differences in modality between English and Chinese in several areas with potential significance to L2 teaching and learning; it reports on an empirical study as a pioneering effort to investigate the difficulties Chinese adult ESL learners may have with the English AUX and to find implications for teaching the English AUX; it predicts, for future research, more areas where Chinese learners of English may have syntactic and semantic problems with the English AUX.;Two hypotheses (one syntactic, one semantic) are taken up in detail in the empirical study. 20 Chinese ESL subjects are used as an experimental group, and 20 native American students are used as a control group of native speakers. Four testing instruments are used and the method employed is descriptive.;The results of the empirical study show that, syntactically, Chinese learners tend to make incorrect hypotheses based on the presence of grammatical English input, a learning process complicated by the lack of negative evidence in the ordinary English input plus the subtle influence of their mother tongue on interlanguage grammar. The results also show that, semantically, Chinese learners of English tend to use the strategy of matching certain English modals with their Chinese "counterparts", which results in their attributing only one meaning to forms which should be ambiguous; furthermore, when they do associate two readings with a single form, they tend to rely heavily on a hierarchically arranged set of linguistic conditions.;Based on the empirical study, this thesis stresses the importance of negative evidence and the necessity of richer situational contexts in teaching the English AUX system.