An Output-guided Study of Chinese Students’ ESA Difficulty

Abstract

English subjunctive mood is always considered as the most difficult part of English teaching. English subjunctive mood carries specific grammatical features such as verbal inflexions, sentences structure, tenses and the understanding of counterfactual meaning. Swain (1985, 1995a, 1995b) poses Output Hypothesis to explain the difficulty of the L2 learners. Based on the hypothesis, pedagogical instructions are also provided theoretically. Other scholarly efforts such as Levelt (1989) and Gass (1988, 1997) are also made to establish the models of SLA. Output Hypothesis is largely applied to a lot of empirical studies, but a specific framework is never found to explain and solve the ESA difficulty that Chinese college English majors have. The present research, on one hand, evaluates the models of SLA, on the other hand introduces Schema in cognitive linguistics to establish a framework that can explain and solve the ESA difficulty.