Third language acquisition of word order in English affirmative and interrogative structures by L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin learners

Abstract

This study aimed to test three hypotheses: 1) similarities and differences exist between the production and perception errors of word order in L3 English affirmative and interrogative structures by L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin learners; 2) positive and negative transfer from L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin to L3 English are evidenced in the production and perception of word order in affirmative and interrogative structures; 3) with respect to negative transfer, the production and perception of L3 English word order are negatively influenced by both L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin. However, the negative transfer is more influenced by L2 Mandarin learners with a higher L3 proficiency level, and more influenced by L1 Yi learners with a lower L3 proficiency level.

The participants were 60 Yi ethnic minority students with 30 students from Luohe Nationality Junior Middle School and the other 30 students from Yuxi Normal University in Yunnan Province, China, respectively. The learners were divided into the beginner and upper-intermediate level groups by means of an English proficiency test and a Mandarin proficiency test. The instruments employed were the data elicitation production tasks including a written task (multiple choice task) and an oral task, a perception task (grammaticality judgement tasks), and a questionnaire.

The findings were summarized in five dimensions. Firstly, the learners of the low English proficiency level tended to produce more interlingual errors and less intralingual errors, whereas the learners of the high English proficiency level committed more intralingual errors and less interlingual errors. Secondly, high proportions of the interlingual errors and intralingual errors were revealed in the production tasks, but lower proportions of intralingual errors and relatively higher proportions of interlingual errors were examined in the perception task. Thirdly, the results from the beginner learners indicated that cross-linguistic influences from L1 Yi word order were more evident than from L2 Mandarin word order and other structures, whereas the results from the upper-intermediate learners showed that interlingual errors from L2 Mandarin word order and intralingual errors of L3 English were more observable. Fourthly, the beginner learners produced more errors than the upper-intermediate learners in both the oral and written production tasks, whereas the upper-intermediate learners produced extremely less errors, especially in the oral production task. Lastly, both the beginner and upper-intermediate learners produced lower error rates of L3 English word order in the affirmative structures than in the interrogative structures. Accordingly, the results confirmed the hypotheses of this study.

Therefore, it can be assumed that the L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin learners were confronted with more difficulties in producing the interrogative structures rather than the affirmative structures, because strong negative influences from L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin word order were implicated in both the production and perception of L3 English interrogative structures. The findings from this study contributed to the area of L3 acquisition and yielded some pedagogical implications.