A Study Of Chinese EFL Students’ Acquisition Of English Achievement Motion Verbs From The Perspective Of Aspect

During the process of English learning verbs play a significant role, in which English MVs are the pivotal part. Therefore, English MVs have been the research focus for many a scholar. Many researchers have explored English MVs form the perspective of lexicalization. However, little emphasis has been laid upon the aspectual point of view. Thus, based upon the previous studies, this research is designed to probe into the Chinese EFL students’acquisition of English achievement MVs from the perspective of aspect. And thereby two question are raised as follows:1. What are the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL students and English native speakers in their acquisition of English achievement MVs from the perspective of aspect?2. Aspectually, is Chinese EFL students’ acquisition of English achievement MVs related to their English proficiency level?Taking four frequently used English achievement MVs, namely arrive, enter, fall and leave as the research subject, this thesis attempts to unveil the features of Chinese EFL students’acquisition of English achievement MVs from the perspective of aspect. The research corpora used in this thesis are WECCL 2.0 from SWECCL 2.0 and COE from COCA. By means of data analysis and discussion, major findings are summarized as follows:(1) The biggest similarity shared by Chinese EFL students and English native speakers is that Perfective and Imperfective take up the most part of the total grammatical aspects while Phase and Habitual hold the least. However, the difference is that Chinese English learners use more Imperfective than Perfective concerning the four verbs while English native speakers use more Perfective than Imperfective in arrive and leave. It may be attributed to the fact that arrive and leave are often used to denote events that have occurred. In addition, the four different types of aspects are all used by native speakers while in WECCL 2.0 there is no use of Habitual for which the semantic feature of achievement MVs may account.As for the tenses of the four verbs used, native speakers share the similarity with Chinese EFL students that they both rarely use progressive tense and future tense of English achievement MVs. It is worth noting that progressive tense is embodied mainly by enter and fall. And the progressive tense of arrive and leave are mainly used to indicate future time and thereby falls into the type of future tense. However, they differ in the most used tense. In WECCL 2.0 it is the simple present tense of all the four verbs that is most used while in COE when concerning arrive and leave it is the simple past tense that is used in highest frequency.(2) In terms of grammatical aspects of the four English achievement MVs, Imperfective is used in highest frequency by Chinese English learners and Perfective comes second regardless of the students’English proficiency. What’s more, there is no token indicating the use of Habitual in WECCL 2.0. The biggest difference among Chinese EFL students is that Phase is rarely used and only used by students of high English proficiency, revealing the use of Phase is closely related to Chinese EFL students’ English proficiency.With regard to the tenses of the four English achievement MVs, simple present tense takes up the most part despite the students’ English proficiency level. What’s more, the rarely used tenses of English achievement MVs mainly consist of progressive tense and future tense except fall of which perfect is least used. In addition, the progressive tense of the chosen English achievement MVs are only used by students of intermediate and high English proficiency which probably suggests the close link between the use of progressive tense and students’ English proficiency.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one is a general introduction consisting of research background, significance of the research and organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review, presenting a general review of aspect and English MVs as well as their acquisition.Chapter Three introduces research methodology, posing two research questions and depicting the method of data collection and the procedure for data analysis.Chapter Four is the core chapter. First, it introduces the aspectual characteristics of the four chosen English achievement MVs. Then it moves to describe the usage of the four words via contrasting the data from SWECCL 2.0 and COCA from the perspective of grammatical aspect and tense in sentences. And through the comparison and analysis of the usage, some discussions are made, aiming at supplying answers to the two research questions.Chapter Five presents a conclusion, reporting the major findings of the research and the implications on the aspects of English achievement MVs learning and teaching, In addition, limitations of the study and suggestions are given to enlighten further research.