A Study On The Acquisition Of English Personal Reference By Chinese EFL Learners

Making appropriate use of reference has always been important to produce a clear and cohesive discourse.Much related research has been done at home and abroad from different dimensions.However,most of these studies focus on the structural and pragmatic dimensions,attributing the incomplete acquisition of personal reference to the accessibility of information and continuality of topic in discourse.Few of them discussed the L1 conceptual transfer.Thus,this study based on Slobin’s thinking-for-speaking hypothesis and Langacker’s construal theory,aiming to discover the unique distribution of English personal reference in oral narratives and to find out to what extent Chinese EFL learners can acquire English personal reference.The research questions are as follows.1)To what extent do Chinese EFL learners acquire English personal reference?2)To what extent are Chinese EFL learners affected by their existing L1 thinking patterns?Linguistic forms were identified and collected from 20 NESs and 60 Chinese EFL learners of different proficiency levels to introduce,to maintain,and to reintroduce characters throughout their oral narratives.These referring expressions are subcategorized as indefinites,identifiable nominals and referential pronominals.The data were then analyzed by means of SPSS,yielding the following results:1)Both similarities and differences in the distribution of personal reference are found in English narratives produced by NESs and Chinese EFL learners.Firstly,all L2 learners are found to display a distribution pattern similar to that of NESs.Indefinites occur commonest for character-introduction,referential pronominals are most preferred for character-maintenance,and identifiable nominals dominate for characterreintroduction.Secondly,L2 learners produce much fewer personal referring expressions in their narratives compared with NESs.Finally,there are also noticeable differences in the personal reference used for each function between Chinese EFL learners and NESs.In character-introduction,L2 learners omit some characters,and produce more hypernyms with lower specificity.In character-maintenance,the former group shows a limited use of relative pronouns and he.In character-reintroduction,Chinese EFL learners tend to make up names and dialogues,whereas NESs produce more longer expressions like identifiable nominals and pronouns.2)Chinese EFL learners are still struggling in reconstructing the concept of reference.L1 conceptual transfer still persists in the construing ways,narrating habits and language forms when L2 learners are producing English narratives.To begin with,learners with higher L2 proficiency are found to adopt more target-like ways of construal.To be specific,they choose main characters to be the trajectory,make better use of current discourse space to maintain and to reintroduce characters.In addition,low-intermediate L2 learners tend to borrow Chinese ways of narrating.The most typical examples are names and dialogues.L2 learners also display phasic characteristics in terms of linguistic presentation.For example,the frequencies of bare NPs,names and reflexive pronouns can be reflected as: NESs < advanced L2 learners < high-intermediate L2 learners < low-intermediate L2 learners < NCSs.It stays true in terms of personal pronouns only if we view it from another direction.The study reveals the features of the acquisition of the English personal reference by Chinese EFL learners and tries to explain that from the L1 conceptual transfer,providing certain implications for EFL teaching in China.That is,we are advised to focus not only on the instruction of the English linguistic forms but also on helping the learners to find out the different ways of narrating and construing in Chinese and English for better reconceptualization.Due to time constraints and other factors,the reasons leading to the incomplete acquisition are only partially manifested.