A Hard Nut to Crack? : English passive structures for Japanese and Chinese learners of English 【Article】

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This empirical study on passive structures is done comparatively between Japanese and Chinese learners of English. Though both Japanese and Chinese are said to be topic-prominent, it is still necessary to see whether this typology exerts any different influence on the acquisition of English passive structures by the two different native language speakers. Differences were found in the ergatives among the three languages. English and Chinese differ in that the former has both paired and unpaired ergatives while the latter has only the paired ones. Though Japanese has passive marker such as rareru like English, the ergative verbs in English may not have the same counterparts in Japanese. Since there is no overt morphological marking for the ergatives, it should be difficult for the learners of English. A total of 160 senior high school and university students from Hiroshima, Japan and Dalian, China participated in the experiment. Based on an English proficiency test they took, the participants in Hiroshima and in Dalian are divided into 4 level groups respectively. They then took a judgement test on passive structures. Although the ANOVA test shows that there are significant differences of English proficiency among the level groups, the participants were not differ significantly in their judgement about passive structures unless they were in levels that were far apart (such as level 4 vs. level 1). The study also found that both the Japanese and the Chinese participants made fewer correct judgement on ergatives than on other types of passive structures. The result supported the hypothesis that passives with ergatives are more difficult for both the Japanese and the Chinese learners of English.