The acquisition of English verb morphology by Chinese adolescents and the role of the learners’ first language

Thesis

The English inflectional morphology has been considered one of the most di;icult aspects to acquire for ESL learners. This study focuses on Chinese adolescent learners’ acquisition of three English features: 3SG-agreement, simple past tense, and progressive aspect. Due to the significant di;erences between the verb morphological configuration of English and Chinese, these three features have been revealed to pose great challenges for Chinese learners. This study explores whether Chinese learners have successfully acquired these three features after several years of instruction and investigates whether the interpretability of features a;ects their learning outcome. The participants were 39 Chinese high school students (aged 16-18) who have been learning English for about 10 years as part of a unified English education following the national curriculum. To assess their acquisition, an oral production task and a grammaticality judgment task were utilised. The results revealed that the learners had not fully acquired any of the three features, with accuracy rates in both tasks well below the 90% threshold of acquisition. Meanwhile, interpretability of the features indeed a;ects their acquisition in L2. Specifically, feature with the lowest interpretability, the 3SG-agreement, which also does not exist in Chinese grammar, was found to have shown the lowest accuracy. In contrast, the progressive aspect, which has relatively higher interpretability, exhibited the highest accuracy among all three features.

Authors: Liao, X

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-b7kae7m2j
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: grammaticality judgement task; ALSLA; interpretability hypothesis; inflectional verb morphology; SLA; quantitative; ALSLA2024; oral production test
• Subjects: English language--Study and teaching (Secondary)--Chinese speakers; Applied linguistics; Oral communication--Ability testing; Quantitative research; English language--Grammar--Ability testing; English language--Verb