Variation in the ba construction in the interlanguage of L2 Chinese

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the variability of interlanguage in Second Language Acquisition. While a substantial body of research has focused upon the sources of this variation in relation to European languages, little has been done to explore variation in Chinese interlanguage, particularly in the use of Chinese syntactic structures. The current study fills this gap. This study investigates the sources of intra- and inter-learner variation in the use of the Chinese ba construction (BC) by adult English and Korean native speakers. The learners participated in the study in both New Zealand (n = 20) and in China (n = 90), with 22 native speakers of Chinese providing baseline data. The entire learner sample consisted of 56 English and 54 Korean native speakers (56 females and 54 males) who had mixed proficiency in Chinese, ranging from late beginner to advanced levels. A battery of three tasks (i.e., an Oral Production Task prompted by Video clips [OPTV], an Oral Imitation Task [OIT], and an Untimed Grammaticality Judgement Task [UGJT] conducted orally) was used to elicit the target types of BC. These tasks afforded four measures - oral production, oral imitation, untimed grammaticality judgments and error correction. Learners' performance was assessed according to the accuracy of their use of BC. The effects of eight potential sources (i.e., linguistic difficulty, task type, starting age, number of years of study, setting, first language, self-rated proficiency, and gender) on the accuracy of use of BC were examined in order to explore the variability in BC in the learners' interlanguage. The study adopted an innovative methodology to examine the variability of BC by considering not only a sociolinguistic factor (i.e., setting) and individual factors (e.g., starting age) but also a psycholinguistic factor (i.e., task). The statistical analyses demonstrated that both linguistic difficulty (i.e., BC type) and task type were significant sources of intra-learner variation in BC. The learners' accuracy scores for BC1 - a (locative) nominal BC whose complement contains a NP were consistently higher than those for BC2 - a directional verbal BC whose complement contains only a directional verb but no NP. The learners' BC scores in terms of the four measures followed the order: Judgments > Correction > Oral production > Oral imitation. Inter-learner variation was examined in terms of two measures: Oral scores (i.e., the average of the oral production and oral imitation scores) and metalinguistic scores (i.e., the average of the judgment and correction scores). The statistical analysis also showed that the sources of the inter-learner variation were the number of years of study, setting, first language, and starting age. The number of years of study positively correlated with the oral and metalinguistic scores for both types of BC. The China group outperformed the New Zealand group in terms of both oral and metalinguistic scores. The Korean learners had higher metalinguistic scores than the English speaking learners, but there was no difference between them in oral scores. Late starters outperformed early starters but only in metalinguistic scores for BC2. In addition, self-rated proficiency significantly correlated with both oral and metalinguistic scores of BC, whereas gender had no effect on the accurate use of BC. This study suggests that multiple sources account for the variation in BC, and that the effects of these sources differ somewhat in terms of the learners' oral and metalinguistic competencies.