A Study On The Acquisition Of The English Predeterminers By Chinese Learners Of English

Ever since the term ‘determiners’ has been put forward in English grammar, there have been a large number of scholars focusing the studies on the classification, their relation with nouns and the internal sequencing. However, few researches can be discovered on the acquisition of determiners. Therefore, based on the corpus-based approach, the present study investigates the acquisition features of the English predeterminers by Chinese learners of English.The main focus of this research is to investigate the acquisition of determiners in English by Chinese learners of English, in particular the use of predeterminers. Supported by the theory of interlanguage and contrastive analysis, corpus-based approach is employed in this study to make a quantitative and qualitative research on the acquisition features of the predeterminers by Chinese EFL learners. With the assistance of the retrieval system software tool, Ant Conc3.2.1.beta, and manual selection, the authentic corpus data are collected from CLEC and LOCNESS.The main findings show that there are significant differences in the use of predeterminers between the native speakers and Chinese EFL learners and discrepancies are also reflected among Chinese EFL learners at different English level. The differences mainly run as follows(1)there is a correlation tendency between Chinese EFL learners and their English level in the acquisition of predeterminers. With the development of their second language, the overall frequency of predeterminers approaches that of the native speakers by Chinese EFL learners. However, compared with English native speakers, Chinese learners on the whole underuse predeterminers in number.(2) in terms of the collocational length of the nouns phrases, the length of the nouns phrases in the learner corpus is not as long as that in the reference corpus. On the other hand, different from native speakers, Chinese EFL learners use more generic nouns to collocate with predeterminers and these nouns have little information content. Native speakers tend to use more complex noun or noun phrases and the collocation type is of richness. These phenomena might attribute to the negative transfer of Chinese EFL learners’ first langauage and psychological factors, the development of interlanguage as well as the current teaching method.The present paper offers some suggestions and references for determiners learning and teaching, thus it has certain practical significance and value.