Avoidance of the English passive construction by L1 Chinese learners

Abstract

This research investigated avoidance behaviour as one of the strategies L2 learners may resort to because of L1-L2 differences, or the non-existence of L2 structures for L1 learners (Schachter 1974; Dagut and Laufer 1985). Schachter (1974) proposed the Avoidance Behaviour Hypothesis, whereby L2 learners were likely to avoid using some L2 structures due to the aforementioned difficulties in L2 acquisition. Later researchers, i.e. Dagut and Laufer (1985), and Laufer and Eliasson (1993), claimed that L1-L2 differences tended to play a role, or at least would be the ‘best predictor’ (1993, p46) of avoidance. However, recent researchers, i.e. Thiamtawan and Pongpairoj (2013; 2019) assumed that, despite any L1-L2 differences, or the non-existence of L2 structures in the learners’ native language, such avoidance behaviour does not necessarily emerge, and they formulated the Factors of L2 Non-Avoidance Hypothesis (FNAH) to explain the non-avoidance phenomenon. In the current study, it was hypothesised that L1 Chinese learners tended to avoid the English passive construction as a result of the structural and distributional differences between the English and Chinese passive structure. The participants in this study consisted of thirty L1 Chinese intermediate-level participants (i.e. B2 in CEFR) as the experimental group, and six native English speakers as the control group formulating the baseline data. The tasks in this study were a comprehension task to check on the L2 learners’ knowledge of the English passive, and two production tasks, i.e. the FishFilm task (Tomlin 1995) and the Indirect Preference Elicitation (IPE) task. Results from the FishFilm task and the IPE task showed that the participants tended not to avoid the English passive construction, which rejected the hypothesis. The reasons for the Chinese learners producing more passive than active structures in both tasks might be the task effect and the learners’ familiarity with the English passive. Due to a large number of active responses and a marginal level of significant difference in the IPE task, this study investigated further the different contexts in the IPE task with respect to the participants’ perspective of whether they considered that the patients in the pictures were suffering from adversity or not. The results clearly revealed that the participants would not avoid the English passive construction under the adversity context due to the transfer of training in the Chinese setting or, to be more specific, the participants transferred their L1 knowledge of the meaning of the Chinese passive into their L2 production. However, there was a tendency for the participants to avoid the English passive construction under the non-adversity context due to the complexities of the English passive construction compared with the active, whereby the participants did not transfer their L1 knowledge of the meaning of the Chinese passive. The findings from this study have contributed to Second Language Acquisition with respect to the L2 avoidance phenomenon.