coursework research
A study of the acquisition of English as second language by two native Chinese speakers
Introduction:
This study is to investigate the acquisition of grammar which includes possible stages of acquisition, inter-learner variation in the areas of word order and morphology. The goal of this study is to balance the relationship between grammar instruction and the acquisition of grammar in the context of the teaching of English as a second language in Chinese school.The Essay is provided by UK Assignment http://www.szdhsjt.com
Data collection:
The survey was taken in two informants who were the sophomore students of non-English major in Daqing Teachers’ University to examine their language proficiency in the three tasks. They were about 18 years old and had been studying English for at least 6 years before going to this college, but they were only good at grammar and reading, and weak in communication and listening ability.
The three tasks were designed in order to examine the informants to what extent mastered some linguistic from in the obligatory contexts. The purpose of the survey was to analyse the informants' six linguistic forms: plural, 3rd person singular, past tense, SV, Yes/No questions and Wh-questions in the obligatory contexts. The first task included three questions which was "what does your father or mother do in a day", "what did you do in the past time" and interesting topics. In the all three sub-tasks, two teachers gave two informants questions respectively, that is to say, Heidi and Ma Jingjing in one group, David & Duan Qingbo in the other group. Task 2 was spot differences. Two informants should discriminate the differences between the two pictures. Task 3 was Casual conversation. Two teachers made casual conversations with two informant respectively. .
Spontaneous speech data was collected from each of two informants to finish the tasks in the study; at the start, midway and at the end. To elicit learner language mastery level, the research were based on dialogue between two informants and an interview format with the researchers. Each dialogue lasted between 10 and 20 minutes. All dialogues were recorded and subsequently transcribed. The transcripts were checked twice with the help of other classmates to ensure that every comprehensible word had been transcribed. Permission to record and use the data gathered was obtained from all informants.
Analysis:
The six linguistic forms were identified in all obligatory contexts by labelling colored pens. The total number of each form in the obligatory contexts were counted . The number of plural, 3rd person singular, past tense SV(O), Yes/No questions and Wh-questions were counted respectively as well to get the raw scores.(这部分在表格里就有具体的数字, 你没看么? 具体划分的资料在我手中) The total mumberr of of English word produced by the informants in each task as well as in the entire data corpus also were counted. Subsequently, using the number of each linguistic form divided by the total number of each form to get the percentage scores. |