A Corpus-based Study Of The Acquisition Of English Passive Voice By Chinese Learners

The passive voice is a crucial grammar item in English, for Chinese learners, it is a difficult grammar point. However, Due to the great difference which exists between the Chinese passive voice and the English passive voice, such as in the aspects of the ways of formation, the characteristics of the structure, the tense etc, the Chinese learners will inevitably come across a lot of obstacles in the process of acquiring the passive voice. So far the research about the acquisition of the Chinese learners'English passive voice is still lacking. The domestic research about the English passive voice is mainly restricted to the theory and comparative study between Chinese passive voice and English passive voice, aiming at finding out the similarity and difference of the two kinds of passive voices. While the corpus-based study of the acquisition of the Chinese learners'English passive voice remains unexplored, still less the study abroad of the passive voice acquisition of the learners whose native language is Chinese.As a matter of fact, it is of great significance to analyze and conclude the Chinese learners'acquisition of the English passive voice and put forward some suggestions and enlightenment for the foreign language learning and teaching, basing on the corpus which is a helpful and useful resource for the EFL.This thesis is aimed at revealing the distribution and characteristics of the passive voice employed by Chinese students by comparing the utilization of passive voice in ST3, a subcategory of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), with that in five sub-corpora from BNC (British National Corpus). It is a computer-aided and corpus-based study. The concordance tool, Wordsmith is employed. Based on the study, it attempts to classify the misutilization of passive voice by Chinese learners, analyze the reasons that result in the mistakes.The result of this study indicates that"Be-Ven", the typical structure of the passive voice in English, is the most frequently used pattern by Chinese students to convey passiveness. In the meantime, mistakes that are made universally by Chinese students are researched into and found out. Types of mistakes are classified into different groups according to their nature, while causes for the production of mistakes are analyzed. At the same time, the reasons resulting in the production of these mistakes are also investigated and given. First of all, negative transfer of the first language accounts for the most mistakes made by the students. Learners'un-solid memorizing of the basic rules with regard to the forms of past participles and their unfamiliarity with the complicated verbs of English language also leads to the misutilization of passive voice by students.At last, a conclusion is drawn to the acquisition of the Chinese learners'English passive voice, based on which some constructive advice is provided to the teaching of passive voice, so this study is of empirical and realistic value.