A Survey On Subjunctive Mood Acquisition Transfer Of Non-english Major Students

For English learners in China,subjunctive mood has long been a difficult grammar point.Chinese students’ use of subjunctive mood is easily affected by factors like syntactic differences between English and Chinese,thinking modes,classroom teaching quality,and usage scenarios,making it hard to learn.Non-English majors still have a high demand for English language learning at the college level.Understanding the acquisition of subjunctive mood by freshmen can provide both an understanding of subjunctive mood acquisition in high school and a direction for teaching strategies in the next stage.Based on the Markedness Differential Hypothesis,interlanguage theory and language transfer theory,this study probed into the use of the subjunctive mood in written language with the help of the grammar-translation method,attempting to reveal the deep causes of English subjunctive mood usage errors.On this basis,the following questions are explored:(1)What types of errors occur in nonEnglish majors’ subjunctive mood output?(2)What is the distribution of subjunctive mood acquisition errors among non-English majors at junior grades?(3)What are the causes of subjunctive acquisition errors?This study mainly adopted the grammatical translation test to conduct this survey.To begin with,it designed grammar translation questions to test the production of 95 non-English major freshmen at a university in Shandong,and collected data.Then the researcher conducted annotation of subjects’ use of subjunctive mood,compared and summarized various types of subjunctive mood errors,depicted typical errors,and analyzed the relationship between errors and the differences between English and Chinese language representation.Ten participants are selected for interviews grounded on the principles of accessibility and convenience after the grammatical translation test.Through the classification and statistics of learners’ errors,this study categorized the subjunctive mood errors in the written English of freshmen non-English majors into three major errors and other minor errors.The major errors include had done-erroneous,would-error nous,and misuse of MP.In terms of the distribution of error,differences are present in the use of the subjunctive mood marker of if and the subjunctive mood marker of would;non-English majors are often confused about the tense of the subjunctive mood and tend to misuse had done as the general past tense.The representations of error types are not mutually exclusive.This study proposes three major reasons for the above situation: interlingual negative transfer,intralingual negative transfer,and non-linguistic factors.Doubling marking is absent in Chinese counterfactual sentences but seen frequently in English ones.Thus,the lack of awareness of this difference leads non-English majors to ignore the grammatical rule changes in English subjunctive mood.This study examined the types of errors in English learners’ authentic output based on the conceptualization of subjunctive mood by native speakers of English and Chinese as a comparison basis,and found that the errors in learners’ output were similar to the conceptualization of the native language and differed but not significantly from the conceptualization of the target language,leading to confusion in the way learners conceptualized subjunctive mood.It can be assumed that the learners’ output is influenced by the conceptualization transfer of native language.