5 - Second language acquisition by native Chinese speakers

Summary

English is the second language most widely learned by Chinese speakers in their native countries or overseas. This chapter focuses on the psycholinguistic research on the learning of English by native Chinese speakers who are immigrants in English-speaking countries. In comparison to English learners in their native countries, English learners in immigration settings experience a more variable English environment, and thus tend to exhibit larger individual differences in their learning speed and the proficiency level they attain in the long run. Therefore, studying English acquisition in immigration settings allows researchers to more fully document the processes by which language proficiency changes, identify persistent linguistic problems, and better understand the factors that impact on language proficiency.

Research on Chinese speakers learning English in immigration settings has been embedded in the larger field of second language (L2) acquisition in which many other native language groups are studied. This line of research has two related goals. The first is to obtain a comprehensive description of the L2 acquisition processes. Such a description involves the growth trajectories of L2 proficiency in different linguistic components (e.g. phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax) and how they vary among L2 learners of different ages. As first language (L1) proficiency also changes along with L2 acquisition in immigration settings, a recent advance in the field is to include L1 proficiency change in the same picture. The second goal is to identify the factors impacting on L2 acquisition.