A Study on the Performance of Marine Technology Students in Complex Noun Phrases of English

海院學生英語複雜名詞片語的使用表現

楊碧藍(Yang Pi-Lan)

《高雄海院學報》 18期 (2003/12) Pp. 133-149

摘要

一九四，五零年代，心理學的行為主義，深深地影響了語言學的發展及觀念。行為主義認為，語言學習屬於刺激和反應的關係表現。換言之，語言學習是一種習慣的養成。因此，如何養成新習慣或者最起碼克服舊習，便成了外語學習中最重要的課題。亦即，防止母語的習慣移轉至新語言的使用裡，變得相當重要。一九五七年，拉度倡言比較分析法，藉以比較母語和新語言的異同，以便儘量消除外語學習的困難。
本研究旨在探索海院學生英語複雜名詞片語的使用表現。一九七四年，夏赫特表示，在她的研究中，中國學生特意避免使用關係子句，亦即複雜名詞片語。然本研究的結果卻無法顯示，海院學生在他們的英文自傳裡，刻意避開書寫關係子句。並且，他們的錯誤並非來自語言移轉。此時，教學法可能影響結果，應欲考慮。然而，由於本研究無法隨機取樣，又無控制組以比較結果。故僅能提供參考，無法提供結論。

關鍵字

語言移轉 ； 比較分析法 ； 複雜名詞片語

並列摘要

In the 1940s and 1950s, behaviorism in psychology overwhelmingly influenced the concepts of linguistics. It asserted that language acquisition derives from the relationship of stimulus-response. In other words, language acquisition is a kind of habit formation. Accordingly, in the field of second/foreign language learning, it is widely assumed that it is a central issue to replace an old set of habit acquiring in first language acquisition with a new set of habit. At least, such an old set of habit should be overcome as much as possible. Obviously, it is generally believed that language transfer is very likely to take place in second/foreign language learning. In this view, Lado(1957) proposes a contrastive analysis to compare what is different and similar between the native language and the target language on the grounds that the difficulties of second/foreign language learning could be solved to the extent. The focus of this study is on the performance of marine technology students in complex noun phrases of English, whose syntactic structure is completely opposite to that of Chinese. In 1974, Schachter once suggested that Chinese students in her study attempted to avoid using complex noun phrases with relative clauses. That is an avoidance strategy. It is worth investigating what causes the avoidance strategy. However, the findings of the study do not strongly indicate such a strategy to take place. Based on the data analysis, there are still 55% of the participants who pass in their assignments trying to write complex noun phrases with relative clauses in their autobiographies. In addition, the errors on complex noun phrases do not result from language transfer. As such, instruction might play a role in the findings. Nevertheless, the study belongs to a pre-experiment (Nunan, 1992), which does not randomly select the participants, and it also lacks a control group to compare the results. Consequently, the findings only provide references, and cannot lead to any conclusion.

並列關鍵字

language transfer ； contrastive analysis ； complex noun phrase