A Study On The Acquisiiton Sequence Of English Syntacitc Stmctures Of The College Students In China

Acquisition sequence has continued to attract the attention of researchers in the area of languageacquisition. Various attempts on this issue have been made for investigating the internal process of languageacquisition and providing more empirical evidence for some language acquisition theories. Early work onacquisition sequence abroad in1960s consisted of detailed studies which attempted to find the developmentalsequences in L1acquisition. The studies on this issue have later aroused more interest in second languageacquisition and some studies were carried out to investigate the acquisition sequence of learners with Englishas a foreign language since1980s. The studies on the acquisition sequence of syntactic structures in Chinahave attempted to examine the acquisition of negatives, interrogatives and relative clauses which had beenexplored by the research abroad and have been subject to some claims that the studies were restricted to a setof syntactic structures and included some weakness in research methods.This thesis discusses Chinese students’ acquisition sequence of four English syntactic structuresclassified from the angle of constituent order in English and Chinese by investigating and analyzing thetranslation performances of60Chinese college students in three different proficiency groups—lower-intermediate, intermediate and advanced. The first major objective of this work is to investigateacquisition sequence of the four English syntactic structures of Chinese students; Another objective is toexamine the relationship between acquisition sequence of the four English syntactic structures of Chinesestudents and students’ English proficiency. The significance of the study can be illustrated as follows:(1)thisstudy of the four English syntactic structures attempts to make classification of students’ translationperformances by six criteria, which will provide more empirical evidence for the studies of acquisitionsequence;(2) this study will help English teachers to better organize teaching content of English syntacticstructures for the purpose of students’efficient English grammar learning.This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter I is the introduction of this thesis,which comprises thebackground of some studies on acquisition sequence and other studies on constituent order, the objectives andsignificance of the research topic of the present study; Chapter II mainly makes a review of foreign anddomestic scholars’ research on the acquisition sequence of grammatical features, including morpheme,negatives, interrogatives,relative clause. ect.,from1970s to the present; Chapter III overviews some theoriesrelated to acquisition sequence and syntactic structures, particularly the classification of English syntacticstructures from the angle of constituent order will be made later. Chapter IV is the empirical investigation ofacquisition sequence of syntactic structure of college students in China，which comprises research question, research subject and research process with the analysis of research findings. Chapter V concludes the mainfindings of the empirical research. It was found that there exists difference between acquisition sequence ofsyntactic structures of subjects at different English proficiency levels. The significance and limitations of thisstudy will be made in the last part of this chapter with some suggestions in the further research.