A Study On Chinese Undergraduate And Postgraduate English Majors’ L2 Listening And Reading Automaticity

As a specific form of skill acquisition, second language acquisition (SLA) concerns both how linguistic knowledge accumulates and how linguistic skills are automatized. However, language automaticity had always been neglected in linguistic fields until recent decades when psycholinguistics began to gain popularity. L2 Automaticity studies take an information processing perspective to study how automatically learners process a second language, exploring the psychological mechanisms underlying language comprehension.The present study aims to investigate the L2 listening and reading automaticity of Chinese undergraduate and postgraduate.English majors in lexical access, syntactic parsing and semantic proposition formation, and to explore whether the subjects’ listening and reading automaticity correlate with each other in order to further reveal the characteristics of second language automaticity. Adopting the definition of automaticity as a multi-dimensional and dynamic concept, RTs, CVs and ACCs was collected as indices to represent processing speed, stability and accuracy respectively. 54 undergraduate English majors and 30 postgraduate English majors from Southeast University participated in the listening automaticity test. Four months later,55 undergraduates and 20 postgraduates from the same pool of subjects participated in the reading automaticity test. Of all subjects,47 undergraduates and 20 postgraduates completed both tests. A cross-sectional analysis was conducted by means of independent t-tests to make a revelation of the differences between the undergraduate and postgraduate English majors in both listening and reading automaticity. Pearson’s Correlation was also employed to find out if there was correlation between listening and reading automaticity.The major findings are as follows:1) The postgraduate English majors surpassed their undergraduate counterparts in the listening automaticity test, especially on sentential level, with better stability and higher accuracy. However, postgraduates had no obvious advantage over undergraduates in terms of processing speed, and no difference was found on lexical level, either.2) No significant difference between the two groups of subjects was found on either sentential or lexical level in the reading automaticity test.3) As for the relationship between listening and reading automaticity, the results diverged between the two groups of subjects. For the undergraduate group, listening and reading automaticity correlated in a low degree. However, for the postgraduate group, no correlation was identified between their listening and reading automaticity.The results suggested that the automatization process of a second language conforms to the curve of the law of practice and ceiling effects occur in the late stage of second language acquisition. Theoretically, the results support Anderson’s ACT* theory, contributing to the understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying complex skill acquisition. Practically, the fact that the development of listening automaticity lags behind that of reading automaticity reflects the overdue emphasis on reading in Chinese English education. Due to the skill-specific nature of L2 automatization, the development of reading and listening automaticity is neither synchronous nor mutually transferable. Therefore, in second language teaching and learning settings, listening and reading as two different skills should be treated specifically and equally.