A Study Of Chinese Learners' Interlanguage Knowledge Of The English Articles

The major concern of second language acquisition research is with how interlanguage develops. This thesis focuses on one area of study along this line by investigating Chinese learners' interlanguage knowledge of the English articles. An exploratory study shows that Chinese learners of English have a good command of some article usages but exhibit incomplete knowledge of other usages in spite of their high level of English proficiency. Learners' incomplete article knowledge is brought to a close scrutiny in this thesis, centering on three research questions: (1) how do typological differences between English and Chinese influence English article acquisition by Chinese learners? (2) how does article semantics affect ease or difficulty in the acquisition of different English article usages? and (3) how does the learner factor constrain input processing in English article acquisition? A review of literature shows that the three factors specified in the research questions bear on L2 learners' development of interlanguage knowledge of the English articles. Based on this review, a unified framework in conformity with the cognitive approach to SLA is proposed, guiding subsequent research.Within the framework three studies were carried out with each focusing on one factor. Study 1 examines the learner factor and its influence on article acquisition. The results show that adult learners' preferred cognitive learning style has a role to play in input processing, which manifests itself in either interlingual or intralingual interference in the acquisition process. Study 2 probes the phenomenon of overgeneralization of the in L2 article acquisition. Previous studieshave shown that L2 learners tend to overgeneralize the in non-obligatory contexts. Although various explanations for such overgeneralization errors have been given, the present study approaches the issue from a different perspective and affords evidence that complex article semantics might be an underlying cause. Study 3 focuses on the erroneous nonuse of surface articles (otherwise known as the zero phenomenon) in L2 article acquisition. An analysis of the noun phrase typology reveals that English and Chinese differ in the internal structure of noun phrases and due to this difference, the distribution of bare singular count nouns are much restricted in English. However, the study shows that Chinese learners of different English proficiency exhibit a strong tendency to accept bare singular count nouns both in comprehension and in production, although this form is deviant from the native speaking norm. A conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that the NP typology is related to the zero phenomenon.The three studies have gone some way towards answering the three research questions. All the three factors (i.e. typological differences between English and Chinese, article semantics and the adult cognitive learning style) influence English article acquisition by Chinese learners and contribute in various ways to their incomplete article knowledge. The studies have done much to deepen our understanding of how adult L2 learners acquire the English article system in the Chinese context.