Second Language Acquisition of If-conditionals in English

• Main Authors: Stella Hsiu-hui Liu, 劉秀蕙
• Other Authors: Chun-yin Doris Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/37813654988967870511

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === In second language acquisition, English conditionals are regarded as one of the most difficult constructions (Covitt 1976). However, little research has conducted an empirical study on the competence and performance of Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition on conditional sentences. Therefore, the present study aims to conduct an integrated study to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English if-conditionals. A comprehension task (i.e. grammaticality judgment task) and a production task (i.e. elicited translation task) were employed, both of which were presented in two formats (in isolation and in context). Factors such as L1 transfer and L2 proficiency were examined. The subjects were sixty college freshmen in Taiwan, and they were further divided into three groups according to their English proficiency levels. In addition, a corpus study was conducted by examining the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English to compare with the findings of the empirical study. The results show that the seven conditional types exhibited different degrees of difficulty. The predictive conditional was found the easiest type, followed by present hypothetical and present counterfactual conditionals. In addition, the past counterfactual as well as the factual conditionals were found challenging and the future hypothetical and mixed-timed-reference counterfactual conditionals were the most difficult to acquire. Syntactic and semantic complexity along with L1 transfer accounted for the subjects’ developmental patterns. As for the task effects, the performance on the comprehension task were better than their performances on the production task; they did not perform significantly better on the tasks contextual cues. With regard to L2 proficiency, the present findings indicate that the subjects at higher L2 proficiency levels performed better than the lower proficiency groups. In addition, the subjects of lower L2 proficiency made more interlingual errors while those of higher L2 proficiency produced more intralingual errors. Finally, the corpus findings show that the conditional type rarely used was likely to be more difficult for the subjects in the present study.