Investigation And Analysis Of Chinese English Majors’ Acquisition Of English Nominalization

As a ubiquitous language acquisition phenomenon in language use, Englishnominalization is of high complexity and creativity. The use of nominalizationindicates the syntactic maturity on the part of the students. It is a main linguistic formfor advanced learners to acquire. This makes the investigation necessary andworthwhile. So far, there has been still sorely lacking in the study on the use ofEnglish nominalization among Chinese English majors. Therefore, this thesisconstitutes an attempt to investigate and analyze Chinese English majors’ acquisitionof English nominalization.This study is divided into two parts. The first part investigates and compares theuse of English nominalization between native college students and Chinese Englishmajors. The data are taken from Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS) and two sub-corpora of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) St5(writings of intermediate English major) and St6(writings of advanced Englishmajor). SPSS19.0and Wordsmith3are used as instruments to find the differences ofthe use of nominalization between native college students and Chinese Englishmajors. Statistics shows that the frequency of nominalization of Chinese Englishmajors is significantly lower than that of English native college students. ChineseEnglish majors underuse the English nominalization in comparison with Englishnative college students.In the second part, the subjects of this study are243Chinese English majorsfrom grades of freshman, sophomore, and junior in Huaqiao University. Timed anduntimed compositions are collected as samples to test the two hypotheses. Thesamples in the use of nominalization are filtered manually to get rid of invalid ones.Statistic analysis confirms that Chinese English majors’ acquisition of Englishnominalization is on the whole in correlation with their proficiency levels. ChineseEnglish majors with higher language proficiency level produce nominalization morefreely and frequently than those lower language proficiency level. Moreover, in thestudents’ compositions in this study, there are many cases of overused and misused -ing form. The overused and misused N+of structure are also found.This thesis further probes into the factors resulting in the overuse and misuse of-ing form. The factors include:1) The learning order of-ing form is earlier than othernoun suffixes for nominalization.2) Students are not sensitive to other noun suffixesfor nominalization, except-ing form.3) Students’ acquisition of nominalization isinfluenced by students’ habit of word to word translation.4) The input ofnominalization is inadequate.5) Students lack awareness of construction rules ofnominalization and the differences between Chinese and English.6) Transfer oftraining has impact on the students’ nominalization acquisition.In addition, N+of structure is influenced by negative intralingual and interlingualtransfer.Pedagogical implications are generated from the above findings:First, great attention should be paid to the Chinese and English cultural diversityand the differences between Chinese and English. The density and abstractness ofnominalization should be explained to students. Teachers should collect examples asmany as possible to show and analyze the proper use of nominalization for students.Second, imitate native speakers. Adopting presentation, practice, productionapproach, the teachers help students to practice the forms of nominalization and theconversion of V+O or other structures to nominalization forms. Meanwhile, measuresshould be taken to counteract the effects of training transfer.Third, teacher should understand the causes of the misuse and take precautionsagainst overgeneralization of the rules.Fourth, teacher should be aware of the nature and characteristics ofnominalization, and the acquisition order of nominalization, having tolerance to tacklestudents’ errors of nominalization.