Form-Meaning Connections In Sla And The Determinatnts

The tense and aspect system in English plays an essential role in English language to express temporality; it is also one of the core tasks of English learning. Tenses in general are a"traditional stumbling-block for learners"(McCarthy, 1991, p. 62). As opposed to children who eventually acquire all of these constructions for expressing time with their fist language, adult L2 learners naturalistically usually do not (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Noyau, Klein, & Dietrich, 1995; Perdue, 1993; Schumann, 1987; Van Patten, 1996). In particular, the simple past morphological inflection–ed is notoriously difficult for learners to acquire (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000). For adult L2 learners, the difficulty of acquiring the tense and aspect system is mainly represented by the incorrect or inappropriate mapping of the forms and their corresponding meanings within a certain context.Usage-based SLA theories hold that the acquisition of grammar is the"piecemeal learning of many thousands of constructions and the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities within them"(N. C. Ellis, 2003, p. 67). Constructions are the basic units of language representation, and they are form-meaning associations. The process of learning the tense and aspect system in English, therefore, is a course of establishing the form-meaning connections of the system. Form-meaning connections have been an integral component of SLA, and have long occupied the interest of SLA researchers. The dissertation adopts VanPatten, Williams, & Rott's (2004) synthesis of FMCs in second language acquisition to elucidate this issue with regard to the definition, features, and stages involved in the process; additionally, the affecting factors from both conventional and psycholinguistic perspectives are compared as well. Since constructivists maintain that simple learning mechanisms operate in the same way across human systems for perception, motor action, and cognition; language learning is no exception. Associative learning theory is applicable to all learning mechanisms; therefore, it can also be viewed as the psychological learning mechanism underpinning the acquisition of constructions. Furthermore, factors that might affect this information processing mechanism are identified so as to better understand and improve the form-meaning associations in language learning, such as frequency, contingency, cue competition, salience, overshadowing and blocking, cross linguistic transfer and attention etc. As these determinants suggest that second language adult learners may have selective and biased attention toward their L2 learning resulting from their entrenchment in their L1 convention, additional attentional resources are needed for noticing the gap between the interlanguage and the target language as the stimuli for further learning. This naturally necessitates explicit learning for a comprehensive and native-like FMCs for adult L2 learners. Following this argument, implicit leaning/knowledge and explicit learning/knowledge and their interface issue are discussed. Generally, despite the controversy over the interface issue, it is agreed that explicit learning can assist in the acquisition of language. Based on the above proposed theoretical framework, the research questions are then formulated as: 1). To what extent do Chinese learners acquire English simple past tense and establish the form-meaning connections? 2). What are the determinants affecting the simple past tense form-meaning association? Is implicit learning sufficient for the establishment of form-meaning connections? 3). If implicit learning alone cannot guarantee the full Form-meaning Connections of the simple past tense, what role does explicit learning play in improving the FMCs of the simple past tense?This dissertation thus focuses on the investigation of how to make form-meaning connections in SLA and the determinants in the process, especially from psycholinguistic and cognitive perspectives, with the evidence from Chinese learners'use of the simple past tense. Two lines of enquiry are involved in the research:First, to what extent have Chinese learners established the form-meaning connections of the simple past tense, and what are the factors determining this establishment process? This line answers the first two research questions by presenting the current studies in the dissertation with one corpus-based study and one supplementary empirical study; both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to process the research. Both studies employed translation (from Chinese into English) as the measurement, and two tenses are involved in the translated passage: the simple past and simple present. Furthermore, both the incorrect and correct uses of the tenses are annotated with the occurrence of different types of time expressions as well. The research has found that to some degree, the Chinese learners established form-meaning connections for the prototypical use of the simple past tense, but not in a complete, robust, and target-like way because there were some mismatching of the forms onto the meanings which were displayed by inappropriate tense choices, tense disagreement, tense-related incorrect verb forms, and subject-verb disagreement. Likewise, in translating, the Chinese learners tended to make more meaning-related tense errors than form-related errors, and this echoes with one of the findings in the two corpus-based preliminary studies. They adopted more a sentence-level approach than a discourse approach in making tense choices,"without paying attention to the surrounding context"(Granger, 1998, p. 197). Following these research results, such determinants that may affect their learning are specified in terms of the actual FMCs of the simple past tense reflected by the Chinese learners'use as input frequency, cue competition, salience, blocking and learned attention, L1 influence etc. Apparently, there are many constraints on Chinese learners'establishing the FMCs of the simple past tense, which also indicates that the acquisition of an L2 as a whole is quite a complex, adaptive, and dynamic course. These results attest to the fact that without additional attentional resources, implicit learning alone may not guarantee successfully establishing FMCs of a certain linguistic feature, which makes explicit learning a great necessity in order to raise learners'consciousness and enable them to notice the gap between their production and the target language features.Second, as indicated above, for adult second language learners, since implicit learning alone is insufficient for making the FMCs of the simple past tense, what is the role of explicit learning in the process? This line attempts to provide the answer to the third research question with a tentative study by examining the role of metalinguistic cue in direct focused written corrective feedback as negative evidence in explicit learning of an L2. This study is also a follow-up study from the perspective of language pedagogy with both quantitative and qualitative data as well. Corrective feedback (abbreviated as"CF"below), as negative evidence, helps learners to notice the gap between interlanguage forms and target forms (Schmidt, 1990; 1995). Using a pretest, posttest and delayed posttest design, the study compared 4 treatment groups (focused CF + metalinguistic cue; focused - metalinguistic cue; unfocused + metalinguistic cue; unfocused-metalinguistic cue) and 1 control group in their picturewriting tests; the results indicate that explicit written CF could assist learners'improvement of the simple past tense use, although no differential effect was foundamong the various types of direct CF in this research. In particular, the group of direct focused CF with metalinguistic cue not only outperformed the other three experimental groups and the Control group, but also had some continuous effect. Explicit learning is necessary both theoretically and pedagogically. Teachers need to provide explicit explanation to learners for the purpose of raising more consciousness of a certain linguistic feature and making it more obtrusive, and learners also expect teachers to clearly demonstrate the rules, or clarify their errors; plus, this type of CF was well received and commented by the participants involved, as the summary of the questionnaire indicates. However, the non-linear pattern of the results from the three tests also suggest the repetition and even some regression in this regard, which indicates that it takes more time and efforts to raising learners'attention to the associations between the less salient linguistic forms as cues and their corresponding interpretations as outcomes, for"attempting to establish a direct relationship betweencorrective feedback and successful acquisition of a form is, therefore, over-simplistic and highly problematic"(K. Hyland & F. Hyland, 2006, p. 84).Based on the research findings involved with the dissertation, some teaching implications are proposed in tense teaching and learning, which should be context, genre, and culture specific due to the complexity, the similarities and differences in temporality expressions in English and Chinese, and there is no simple one to one mapping between the forms and meanings. In addition, research evaluations and future research directions are suggested as well.