| Tense and aspect have always been a difficulty and focus in linguistic research and language teaching.Important as it is,the study of tense and aspect mainly focuses its attention on cognitive linguistics,sociolinguistics,and discourse structure,clause types.Even though studies on those perspectives have achieved considerable success,simple past tense studies based on language transfer and markedness theory still need to be perfected.Simple past tense is one of the most representative and complicated tense in the research of tense and aspect.However,both foreign studies and domestic studies lack explorations which especially focusing on simple past tense,but it is common to view simple past tense study as a part of tense and aspect system.As a result of linguistics’ agreement that language learners’acquisition of tense and aspect is affected by many factors,since then factors like intralingual factors are well-developed.But interlingual factors such as the influence of learners’ mother tongue still need more evidence.Therefore,researches based on language transfer and markedness theory is worthwhile exploring.This thesis explores the acquisition of English simple past tense under’ the guidance of language transfer and markedness theory.Additionally,this thesis determines to add more empirical statistics to the previous researches and provides some theoretical as well as pedagogical implications with English teaching and learning by solving these questions:(1)How does language transfer affect Chinese learners’ acquisition of English simple past tense.(2)Does the influence of language transfer differ if English proficiency improves.The investigation of this thesis evolves both quantitative and qualitative methods.It contains 90 students of different levels from Chinese high school,university and graduate school to study whether language transfer affects their English acquisition and whether their English proficiency influences the acquisition.Meanwhile,they are classified into three groups.An experiment with a tense testing paper containing 10 error correction questions,10 gap-filling questions and 5 Chinese-English translation questions based on simple past tense conducted to collect data.First,the descriptive analysis is conducted to find out whether language transfer would affect Chinese learners’ acquisition of English simple past tense.In the meantime,how language transfer affects Chinese leaners’ acquisition is analyzed in detail.Then One-way ANOVA is conducted to explore if there exist significant differences among these three groups’ performance so as to discover whether different levels of English proficiency influences language transfer.Major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)Chinese language learners’ acquisition of English simple past tense is influenced by the fact that Chinese is a language that lacks tense but not aspect,which brings about their tendency to depend on pragmatic,lexical devices and aspect marker such as le rather than grammatical devices.(2)The influence of language transfer decreases as students’ English proficiency improves.This thesis provides significant theoretical implications for second language acquisitions as well as pedagogical implications for language teaching and learning.Theoretically,this study not only complements empirical data to the research of tense and aspect in second language acquisition,but also gives a better understanding of the acquisition of English simple past tense.Pedagogically,the teaching of simple past tense could focus its attention on the perspective of highlighting and underlining the differences between Chinese and English tense and aspect expressions.Meanwhile,teachers could also help students eliminate mistakes observed in this research.Therefore,this research gives linguists,teachers and students a better understanding of tense and aspect,especially simple past tense. |
