Acquisition of English ditransitive construction by adult Malaysian Chinese speakers

This study addresses a pressing issue among adult Malaysian Chinese university students, specifically focusing on their challenges in acquiring the English ditransitive construction. It is imperative to understand why this problem persists and its significance to various stakeholders. Adult Malaysian Chinese university students often struggle with mastering the English language, particularly in acquiring the ditransitive construction. They produce sentences like "I give to her a book" instead of "I give her a book" or "I give a book to her". Similarly, they may say "I stole her a book," intending to express "I stole a book from her" rather than "I stole a book for her". To elucidate the research problem, the theoretical frameworks of the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH), Interpretability Hypothesis (IH), Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), and Bottleneck Hypothesis (BH) were employed. This research centers on the absence of uninterpretable functional features required by the target second language, which are absent in learners' first language. However, a knowledge gap exists regarding whether uninterpretable functional features present in learners' Chinese language but unnecessary in the target English language also pose challenges, particularly in acquiring and producing the English ditransitive construction. Apart from the underlying problems, potential solutions to these problems were also the focus of the study as well as the differing degrees of learning difficulty. To substantiate the claims made in this study, an ex-post facto non-experimental study involving 115 adult L1 Malaysian Chinese university students was conducted through the administration of four types of tests: Oxford Placement Test (OPT), Acceptability Judgment Test (AJT), Ditransitive Judgment Tests (DJTs), and Ditransitive Translation Tests (DTTs). The findings of this study reveal four key insights: (1) Participants' English proficiency ranged from elementary to upper-intermediate levels; (2) Features were transferred from the participants’ first language to the second language, but missing and unwanted uninterpretable functional features caused difficulty; (3) During production, interpretable functional features were accessed, and feature reassembly was engaged to produce correct target language constructions; and (4) Different levels of learning difficulty were observed, with the "provider" feature being the most challenging. The implications of the findings have significance for educators, learners, and curriculum developers, offering insights into effective strategies for addressing these language acquisition and production issues.

Text 124072.pdf Download (1MB) Official URL or Download Paper: https://ethesis.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/18757

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