A Study Of Chinese Senior High School Students' Syntactic And Semantic Acquisition Of English Middle Construction

The Middle Construction often appears in English learning.The unique syntactic and semantic features of this construction has aroused wide attention in the field of linguistics at home and abroad.It is active in the form,but passive in the meaning,so it's called “active form of passive meaning” in the senior English grammar.So far,the linguistic circles have reached an agreement on some basic characteristics of the Middle Construction.In terms of syntax,the Middle Construction consists of three syntactic components: the subject,the predicate verb and the modifier.Non-eventivity,genericity,agentivity and modality are the semantic features of the construction.In addition,there are restrictions on the predicate verb and the adverb modifier in the English Middle Construction.Not all verbs can be used in the Middle Construction,and not all of the construction needs to be modified with adverbs.Therefore,it can be seen that the construction is complex and special,which may bring some difficulties for Chinese learners,especially for high school students.However,most empirical researches of the English Middle Construction focus on the subjects of undergraduate or graduate students,and there are few studies that concentrate on high school students.Based on the previous research achievements of the English Middle Construction,this study made an investigation on students' acquisition of the construction with a questionnaire in a key senior high school of Shanxi Province.There were 120 subjects who came from different grades.The research used Double Factor Variance Analysis,Simple Effect Test and One-Way ANOVA to deal with the collecting data after they were put into SPSS.As a result,we find that the senior high school students' acquisition of English Middle Construction will be influenced by double factors.One is the characteristics of the English Middle Construction,the other is the grade they are in.What's more,there exists a degree of difficulty in the acquisition of the four syntactic and semantic components of the construction among senior high school students.The difficulty sequence is: the middle verb>the adverb modifier>the implicit agent>the genericity.In addition,the last finding is that the senior high school students' acquisition of the construction will be improved with the development of their English proficiency.The teaching suggestions of the study are as followings: firstly,teachers should pay attention to the syntactic and semantic features of the Middle Construction and arrange the grammar teaching appropriately;secondly,the teachers are supposed to focus on the environment of the second language,and increase the input of the target language;thirdly,the teachers need to pay attention to the influence of mother tongue's transfer,and analyze the similarities and difference between Chinese Middle Construction and English Middle Construction.Besides,the grammar teaching needs to be combined with specific context,which can cultivate the students' pragmatic competence.