Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

This study explored whether foreign students’ native languages affect their Chinese grammar acquisition. The subjects were native English, Japanese, and Korean speakers whose Chinese was at the elementary level. Six constructions of Chinese sentences, including subject-verb-object (zhu dong bin) construction, two topic-comment constructions, two Ba constructions, and Bei construction were chosen as the test materials. In the study, the subjects were requested to choose suitable words from the list in the questionnaire, to compare grammatical structure of each example sentence given, then make a corresponding sentence whose grammatical structure was similar to that of the example sentence. Six sentences were made one by one. The rules were defined to score each of the sentences which the subjects made after the test. The results showed that their performances were related to their native languages. There was significant difference between the subjects whose native language was English and those whose native languages were Japanese and Korean in the production of four Chinese sentence constructions: subject-verb-object construction, two topic-comment constructions and one of Ba constructions. The Chinese sentence constructions similar to their native language were mastered more easily than those different to their native language. The findings supported the notion that second language acquisition is affected by learners’ native language and suggested that the foreign students should be taught according to the types of their native languages while teaching Chinese as a second language at the elementary level.

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