L1Transfer In The Acquisition Of English Simple Past By Chinese EFL Learners

Tense/aspect, as one of the most significant and difficult tasks in SLA, has drawn great attention by linguists at home and abroad. In the past twenty years, scholars investigated tense/aspect acquisition from different perspectives and gained great achievements. They found the acquisition of tense/aspect was affected by many factors. Most of their studies concentrated on intralingual factors (e.g. verbal salience, lexical aspect, temporal adverbials and narrative structure), whereas few studies were carried out to investigate interlingual factors (i.e. the effect of L1).Chinese and English have different ways in expressing temporality: English temporality is mainly realized by verbal inflections. By contrast, Chinese is a tenseless language with a rich system of aspect markers, whose temporality is mainly achieved by pragmatic devices, lexical devices, or indirectly by aspect markers. Therefore, for Chinese EFL learners, the acquisition of English tense/aspect will be affected by Chinese tense/aspect. Despite the significant achievements of tense/aspect studies, English simple past still has higher frequency and higher errors in English IL. Therefore, the present research takes simple past as an object to investigate the influence of mother tongue Chinese on the acquisition of simple past by Chinese EFL learners.The present research aims to answer the following two questions:(1) How does Chinese temporality affect the acquisition of English simple past by Chinese EFL learners?(2) Does the influence of Chinese display a balanced development as the English proficiency improves?The participants of the present study are divided into three groups in terms of their English proficiency levels:Grade one students in senior middle school (Preliminary group), Grade two non-English majors in the university (Intermediate group) and Grade three English majors in the university (Advanced group). They were asked to accomplish translation and writing tasks. Then, the author adopted SPSS software to analyze the data and obtained the following findings:(1) The absence of tense in Chinese has an inhibiting effect on the acquisition of English simple past. To be specific, Chinese EFL learners tend to rely on pragmatic devices and lexical devices to express simple past, and consider grammatical devices redundant, which results in their insensitivity to verbal inflections.(2) The presence of the aspect marker le has a facilitating effect on the acquisition of English simple past for Chinese EFL learners.(3) With the improvement of the English proficiency, learners can overcome the effect of L1little by little and the impact of Chinese tense/aspect weakens by degree. However, due to fossilization, advanced learners cannot conquer negative transfer completely, which results in their incompetency of acquiring English simple past.The present research not only has theoretical implications on SLA but also sheds great lights on English teaching and learning in China. Meanwhile, according to the limitations of this study, it also puts forward some suggestions for further research.