A Study On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Middle Construction

English Middle Construction(EMC)refers to the language pattern which,as the traditional grammar prescribes,expresses passive meaning with the active form.The unique syntactic and semantic features of this construction have aroused wide interest of the linguists at home and abroad,whose research mainly focuses on the generation mechanism of EMC and the restrictiveness of verbs in EMC.The syntactic and semantic features of EMC also cause some difficulties in second language acquisition since second language learners often take it as a ungrammatical passive sentence when they first encounter this structure.Although the complexity of this structure brings difficulties to the acquisition of second language learners,fewer studies on EMC acquisition of with senior high school students have been conducted.Based on the Interface Hypothesis and the syntactic and semantic features of EMC,this paper mainly studies the EMC acquisition of Chinese senior high school students with different English proficiency,and analyzes the factors that affect their acquisition.The research questions are :(1)What is the correlation between the English proficiency of high school English learners and their acquisition of EMC ?(2)What are the factors that influence senior high school students’ acquisition of EMC?The participants of this study are 90 students in Grade 2 of a high school,which are divided into high-intermediate level group,low-intermediate level group and low level group.The research instruments are two questionnaires which cover comprehension task and output task,respectively.Their question types are sentence grammaticality judgment and filling in the blanks with the appropriate forms of the verbs.Data results are analyzed by One-Way ANOVA of SPSS software.The study discovers that high school students have difficulties in EMC acquisition,and they can not acquired it well.However,with the improvement of their English,the high school students’ acquisition of EMC is getting better and better,that is to say,the level of students’ English proficiency is positively related to the acquisition,and the English acquisition can be improved by effective learning.The study also shows that there are differences in the acquisition of the three semantic components of EMC among senior high school students,that is,the acquisition of adverb modifiers is better than that of the subject,and the acquisition of middle verbs is the worst.It indicates that syntactic-semantic interface,input quantity and frequency,the amount of drillings and mother tongue transfer may affect EMC acquisition of senior high school students.