英语论文网

Chapter Four Results and Discussion

4.1 Results
The higher score the subjects got for each RC type, the easier they learned thisRC type. As we can see from Table 3, the LG’s learning order of English RCs isSU>DO>GEN>OPREP>OCOMP, and the total score of all the correct RC types forthirty subjects is 697 and the average score for each subject is 23.23. From Table 4 we can see that the total score of grammatical judgment test for LGis 693(30 subjects), and the total score of that for HG is 704 (28 subjects). The meanscore of grammatical judgment test for LG is 23.1, and the mean score of that for HGis 25.1. The correctly used percentage of grammatical judgment test for LG is 77%,and the correctly used percentage of that for HG is 83.81%.As is generated from the previous section, the learning order of English RCs forLG is SU>DO>GEN>OPREP>OCOMP, while the learning order of English RCs forHG is GEN>SU>DO>OPREP>OCOMP. Unlike what we have predicted, both resultsdo not conform to Keenan & Comrie’s Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Theprevious research results of other Chinese scholars were not consistent with that ofKeenan & Comrie either. It is not hard to explain the inconsistency between ours andKeenan & Comrie’s Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Although Keenan &Comrie drew their conclusion (NPAH) over the study of more than fifty languages inthe world, the fifty languages were all used by western countries.
……………

Conclusion

Four questions are raised and four correspondent hypotheses are put forwardaccordingly in chapter three. After a series of analysis on the data collected from thepresent research in chapter four, this section tries to offer answers one by one.First, from the data of the sentence combination test, the sequence of Chinesestudents’ learning English RCs generated is “SU>DO>GEN>OPREP>OCOMP”.Since Keenan & Comrie’s Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy supports the sequence“SU>DO>OPREP>GEN>OCOMP”, on the whole the result of this research conformsto NPAH except for the position of OPREP and GEN.Second, influenced by negative transfer of L1, Chinese students usually makeseven types of errors including resumptive pronoun, erroneous use of relative pronoun,omission of antecedents, non-adjacency, redundant relative clause, structuralconversion and simplification.Third, Chinese students have the tendency to avoid using certain types of EnglishRCs such as OPREP, OCOMP. Language transfer is the fundamental reason for theavoidance phenomenon.
……………
Reference (omitted)