Inception vs Completion: Comparing the Effects of Two Treatments on the Acquisition of le

Abstract

This study aims to explore the effects of two instructional treatments on adult English-speaking Chinese learners’ learning of the Chinese particle le. Previous studies reveal that adult English-speaking Chinese learners’ performance on le structures is subject to the influence of the time grammar of English. Drawing upon Input Processing theory, English-speaking Chinese learners’ performance on le structures correlates to their awareness of the syntactic uniqueness of le, and the awareness may vary according to the way le is introduced. That is, the influence of time grammar on learners may be either strengthened or weakened depending on how learners’ attention is directed at the stage of input. In this sense, this study hypothesizes that the time-analysis based (completion-oriented) instruction will differ from the fact-analysis based (inception-oriented) instruction in effects on English-speaking Chinese learners’ learning of the Chinese particle le. Specifically, learners exposed to the inception-oriented treatment will develop processing strategies that are less subject to time grammar. Relatively, learners exposed to the completion-oriented treatment will be more susceptible to the influence of time grammar transfer in the processing of le structures. An experiment was conducted to compare the effects of the two instructional treatments, and the results of the experiment support the conclusion that the instructional treatments caused differences the two groups’ performances.