This research aims to study the learning of counterfactual conditionals in English by Chinese

Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 General Introduction

This research aims to study the learning of counterfactual conditionals in English by Chinese

EFL learners at the senior high school level. There are two kinds of Counterfactual conditionals:

one is present reference and the other is past reference.

Counterfactual conditionals can be simply defined as the construction of “if p, then q.”

which is used to express an unreal condition, which is thought of as unlikely to happen in the

past or the present. The communicative values of this construction include possibilities, guesses,

wishes, regrets, re-evaluation of a situation, etc. In the present study, the term “counterfactual”

will be used instead of “hypothetical condition” or “subjunctive” (please see section 2.1 in

Chapter 2 for more information). I have chosen to use “non-counterfactuals” where Chinese

grammarians use “reality condition” and English grammarians use “open condition” to describe

the conditionals that are not counterfactual for the purpose of avoiding confusion.

A typical example of present-referenced counterfactual conditionals would be If I were

eighteen years old, I would play on the school basketball team again. Even out of context, we

can easily imagine this utterance must be from someone older than eighteen years old and he

or she is expressing a strong wish which is not fulfilled. More intriguingly, this sentence is

syntactically past tense but is used to refer to present events. Moreover, the past tense copula

“were” is used regardless of the subject-verb agreement. In related literature, this unique

linguistic devise for the expression of the counterfactual is termed “backshifted tense”

(Direven, 1997) and the past tense copula “were” is termed the ”were–subjunctive” (Wu,

1994).

Past-referenced counterfactual conditionals, likewise, also use backshifted tense to denote

their counterfactuality. A typical example would be If I had been you at that time, I would not

have let this happen. The tense which is backshifted is from the past tense to the past

perfective tense.

1.2 Research Findings of Chinese and English Counterfactual Conditionals

Traditionally, research of conditionals in linguistics focuses on cross-linguistic formal and

semantic analysis of conditionals in general (e.g., Sweeter, 1990; Athanasiadou & Direven,

1997; Dancycier, 1998). Studies on counterfactual conditionals are relatively fewer. Among

the limited research findings on counterfactual conditionals in a certain language, Wu (1994)

indicates that English counterfactual conditionals are comparatively morphologically-marked

while Chinese counterparts are more context-dependent. Comrie (1986) furthermore names

Chinese as a language in which degree of hypotheticality is not marked. Despite the syntactic

differences between English and Chinese counterfactual conditionals, no one will doubt the

existence of counterfactual conditionals as a semantic property. That is, counterfactual

conditionals are linguistic-universal.

1.3 Studies of the learning of the counterfactual conditionals in Taiwan

The learning of counterfactual conditionals in a certain language appears to be

comparatively unexplored in SLA studies. Until now, there has been very little research done

on the teaching and the learning of counterfactual conditionals in Taiwan’s EFL fields (e.g.,

Wang & Chang, 1999；Wu, 2003). Wang & Chang (1999) use L2 college compositions to

compile descriptive statistical figures of error frequency in the two kinds of counterfactual

structure

. Wu (2003) explores the effectiveness of two teaching instructions of this particular

challenging structure for Taiwanese junior high students.

1.4 Research Questions

The present research tries to explore whether the lack of overt counterfactual linguistic

devices in Chinese causes problems for Chinese EFL learners at the senior high school level.

The basic assumption of this research is that Chinese EFL learners at the senior high school

level are influenced by their L1 and therefore will find counterfactual conditionals particularly

difficult. In the design of the experimental tasks, the learning is hypothetically divided into

two aspects: the comprehension of the clear-cut semantic distinction between

non-counterfactual and counterfactual conditionals and, secondly, the production of the

1

syntactical/morphological devices for the making of the backshifted tenses. Three research

questions are consequently raised for the purpose of this study. They are as follows:

(1) Do Chinese EFL learners at the senior high school level display difference in their

ability to identify the contexts in which the non-counterfactual or the two kinds of

counterfactual conditionals in English should be used? If so, is there a hierarchy of

degree of difficulty?

(2) Do the two types of counterfactual conditionals in English (present reference and past

reference) syntactically constitute different levels of difficulty for Chinese EFL

learners at the high school level? More specifically, does the backshifted tense

principle or the “were-subjunctive” cause problems?

(3) How can the errors that Chinese EFL high school students make be categorized

qualitatively and quantitatively, according to the related SLA studies?

In order to answer these three research questions, I devise three experimental tasks; they

are Situation Task, Grammaticality Judgment Task and Elicited Translation Task. The details

will be given in Chapter 4.

1.5 Theoretic Background

In this section, we will review three parts of theoretic background (a) the studies of the

mental representation of counterfactuals; (b) Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis; (c)

related counterfactual studies in Taiwan EFL context.

1.5.1 The Mental Representation of Counterfactuals

Bloom (1981), based on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, hypothesizes that since Chinese

lacks overt counterfactual language forms, therefore Chinese L1 speakers will lack

counterfactual ways of thinking. However, this claim has been refuted by Au (1983), Liu

(1985) and Wu (1994). Wu (1994) concludes these studies by pointing out “the ability to

construct mentally what might have been is fundamental to human experiences and is one of

the major phenomena in human experiences. So it is unlikely that any language would fail to

provide its speakers with linguistic devices for expressing counterfactuals” (p.264).

Although studies (Au, 1983; Liu 1985 and Wu, 1994) have shown that Chinese speakers

do not lack counterfactual ways of thinking, we still do not know whether or not the lack of an

overt grammatical category in their L1 would create difficulty for Chinese people in the

learning of counterfactuals in English.

1.5.2 Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive Analysis is based on the assumption that learning difficulty arises from the

similarities and differences between L1 and L2. Therefore, the distinction between positive

and negative transfers is proposed. Positive transfer occurs, when L1 and L2 share similarities

and L1 promotes the learning of L2. On the other hand, if L1 and L2 share more differences

than similarities, negative transfer will occur. It refers to the process in which L1 impedes the

learning of L2. Based on this Positive/Negative distinction, different versions of Hierarchy of

Difficulty are proposed and used to predict the difficulty degree of L2 learners. Table 1-1

presents a simplified version of Stock, Bowen and Martin’s Hierarchy of Difficulty (1965).

Five types of difficulty are involved in this version of Hierarchy of Difficulty and the five

types are ranked in descending order of difficulty and their examples are from an English

speaker learning Spanish.

Table 1-1: Stock, Bowen and Martin’s Hierarchy of Difficulty (1965)

If we use this Hierarchy of Difficulty to predict the learning of English counterfactual

conditionals by Chinese EFL learners, the result would be that the learning is of medium

difficulty (Type of Difficulty 3). The reason of putting the learning into the category of

Difficulty Type 3 is that Chinese lacks the making of tense and modal systems as in English.

1.5.3 Error Analysis

Selinker (1969) posits that learning a second language is more than habit formation or trial

and error. Rather, between L1 and L2, the learners actively construct a rule-governed

“Interlanguage.” Interlanguage is of great value because it is believed to reflect the learning

process of the learners. Under this assumption, “Error Analysis” is conducted to find the

regularities in the Interlanguage forms. This concept can be quite significant in this study since

English in which tense and modal systems are indispensable and these components are

believed to be the most difficult aspect of grammar for Chinese students to learn (Au, 1999).

1.5.4 The Differences between “Mistakes” and “Errors”

It has been noted that not all Interlanguage forms are of pedagogic value and thus it is

necessary to further distinguish Interlanguage forms. Corder (1975) firstly proposes the

distinction between “errors” and “mistakes.” “Errors” refer to those L2 linguistic variations

that are self-uncorrectable and recur systematically, and “mistakes” refers to non-systematic

linguistic variations which are self-correctable and are due to performance failure, memory

lapse or poor physical states. Corder (1975) also points out that unsystematic “mistakes”

should be excluded from the SLA studies and the significance of errors lies in three aspects: (a)

they inform the language teachers of the learners’ linguistic stage; (b) they provide the SLA

researchers with evidence of the learner’s linguistic hypothesis of L2 and the learning

strategies involved in the L2 learning process and (c) they give the learners feedback about

their hypotheses with regard to the target language. As a result, the Interlanguage forms

intended to be studied in this study are the “errors” rather than “mistakes” since “errors” are

considered to be of more significance and the data collected will be analyzed and summarized

qualitatively and quantitatively.

1.5.5 Attributed Error Causes: Interlingual Errors, Intralingual Errors and

Developmental Errors

Various sources of students’ errors have been identified in SLA studies from the 1970s

to the 1980s (Selinker, 1972; Richards, 1974; Taylor, 1976; Littlewood, 1984), but roughly

speaking, errors can be put into three broad categories: Interlingual errors, Intralingual errors

and Developmental errors.

Interlingual errors are also called L1 transfer errors. They refer to errors that reflect

interference from the L1. Intralingual errors refer to misapplication of certain rules from the

L2. Among the Intralingual errors identified so far, overgeneralization is the most common.

It refers to errors arising from the overextension of previous L2 knowledge to an

inappropriate new linguistic context (Richards, 1975). And at last, Developmental errors are

those errors “which reflect the general characteristics of rule learning” (Richard, 1974,

p.174). As for the relation between errors and level of language proficiency, Major (1987)

proposes that the number of transfer errors should decrease over time, while the number of

developmental errors should be small initially but then should increase before finally

showing a decrease.

1.6 The Significance of the Study

investigation of how a particularly challenging grammar pattern is learned. So far there have

not been any studies that focus on the learning of the counterfactual conditionals by Chinese

EFL learners at the senior high school level. Therefore, the present research aims to study

the learning by asking whether the lack of overt counterfactual linguistic cateigories in

Chinese has an influence on Taiwanese EFL learners when they are learning counterfactual

conditionals in English. the possible learning difficulty will be discussed in detail when

syntactical/semantic similarities and differences between the two languages are compared.

Second, it can also be regarded as an attempt to test the efficacy of the related SLA theories

applied in a practical language classroom.

1.7 Organization of This Thesis

Properties of English and Chinese counterfactual conditionals and the differences between

them will be examined in Chapter 2. Related psycholinguistic and SLA theories will be

reviewed in Chapter 3. Subsequently, in Chapter 4 research subjects, methods and analysis

techniques will be introduced. In Chapter 5 results of this empirical research will be presented

and discussed under the theoretical frameworks in Chapter 3. Finally, the conclusion along

with the pedagogical implications and suggestions for further studies will be given.