Second Language Acquisition of English It-Clefts by Taiwanese Students

• Main Authors: Yu-han Carol Liao, 廖于涵
• Other Authors: Chun-yin Doris Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/92933189720498018828

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 102 === The present study aims to conduct an empirical study to explore Taiwanese students’ second language acquisition of English it-clefts. The issues the study probed into include L1 transfer, the difficulty order of English it-clefts with different types of clefted elements, grammatical function effects, contrast effects, and proficiency effects. Besides, an Acceptability Judgment Task was designed to examine the subjects’ preference. Sixty college freshmen were recruited and further divided into three experimental groups, i.e., low, intermediate, and high, based on their English proficiency levels. In addition, twenty English native speakers participated in the study as our control group. The overall results indicated that L1 transfer had an influence on the acquisition of English it-clefts. As for the seven types of English it-clefts with different syntactic categories, our subjects accepted the types of NP, Zero, and PP, followed by N-F CL and ADV P better, and their acceptance rates for FIN CL, and ADJ P were the worst of all. Besides, it was found that different grammatical functions exhibited different degrees of learning difficulties for our subjects. English it-clefts with Adjunct cleftd elements were found to obtain the highest acceptance, the NP Adjunct in particular. With regard to contrast effects, English it-clefts with contrast were found to be better accepted than those without contrast. Finally, our L2 learners’ acceptance rates were found to be influenced by their L2 proficiency. The better the subjects’ L2 abilities were, the better their acceptance of English it-clefts was.