Chapter 4
Research Methodology
In this chapter, after dealing with the counterfactual conditionals in the two languages, I
will present the research. The scope of this study will be presented in section 4.1. In section
4.2 the research questions of the current study will be specified with their respective predicted
results. This is followed by the introduction of research methods and procedures in sections
4.3 and 4.4. and a summary is made in section 4.5.
4.1 The Scope of This Study
The scope of this study will be limited to the learning of two types of English conditionals:
the non-counterfactual conditionals and the counterfactual conditionals of the two tense
references, as exemplified in Table 4-1:
Table 4-1: The three types of conditionals involved in this study
two types of conditionals in English example sentences
non-counterfactual conditionals If it rains, the game will be canceled.
counterfactual conditionals (present
reference
1)
If it rained, the game would be canceled.
counterfactual conditionals (past reference)
If it had rained, the game would have been
canceled.
One thing to note is that conditionals can be of many kinds. These conditionals without
modals in the main clause will not be included in this study since they are not commonly
introduced in textbooks used in Taiwan. Examples of this kind are the following:
(1) If he comes, let him in.
(2) If Mary said she liked the movie, she was just showing off.
1 According to Quirk et al. (1985), the sentence “If it rained, the game would be canceled” can have future-reference meaning but due to this fact, this usage is not commonly included in English textbooks and EFL teaching material in Taiwan. Therefore, it will not be included in this study.
It also has to be pointed out that the two types of tense references in counterfactual
conditionals sometimes can be mixed but mixture between non-counterfactual and
counterfactual conditionals is not allowed. For example, in (3), they consist of the if-clause
taken from the past-referenced counterfactual conditionals and the main clause from the
present-referenced counterfactual conditionals. Given appropriate contexts, it is not difficult
for us to imagine that the speaker hopes to express a re-evaluation of a situation where the
cause originates in the past and the result comes out in the present time. While (4) and (5) are
ungrammatical because they are made up with mixture between non-counterfactual and
counterfactual conditionals (the following examples are taken from Dancygier, 1998).
(3) Tom wouldn’t be so hungry if he had eaten a proper breakfast. (p.33)
(4) *If your mother had been here, she will be in tears. (p.50)
(5) * If John wins in the election, it would be a shock. (p.50)
4.2 Research Questions
So far, we have known that the use of “backshifted tense” makes English counterfactual
conditionals and that Chinese lacks similar overt linguistic categories to express
counterfactuals. Therefore, the substantial question about the learning of the counterfactual
conditionals in English would center on whether the lack of such overt counterfactual
linguistic categories in Chinese language cause problems for Chinese EFL learners at the
senior high school level. Several research questions have been raised to shed light on their
comprehension and production of Chinese EFL learners at the high school level.
(I) Do Chinese EFL learners at the high school level display difference in their ability to
identify the contexts in which the non-counterfactual or the two types of
counterfactual conditional constructions in English should be used? If so, is there a
hierarchy of degree of difficulty?
From the previous discussions, we have already noted that the meaning of counterfactuals
is a linguistic universal phenomenon, but from previous analyses of Chinese and English
conditionals, Chinese language does not make a clear-cut distinction between counterfactual
conditionals and non-counterfactual conditionals without the aid of context, time temporal
and internal semantic logic. Based on this observation, it is hypothesized that Chinese
students will have less difficulty in non-counterfactual conditionals but experience a greater
amount of difficulty in counterfactual conditionals and that the past-referenced
counterfactual constructions will be the most difficult one among the three constructions
because of their structural complexity. The hypothesis is shown in Figure 2.
Table 4-2: The hypothesized difficulty degree of the three kinds of conditionals
Non-counterfactual < counterfactual (present reference)
< counterfactual (past reference)
(II) 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?
The various forms of the backshifted tense principle in English may be problematic for
Chinese EFL learners. The forms of the backshifted tenses may be of three types. The first one
would be as simple as morphemes adding (the morpheme for the past tense ed) to backshift the
present tense to the past tense. Next, in the past reference, the past perfective (had + past
participle) or a past perfective modal is required (would /could /should /might+ have+ past
participle). Thirdly, counterfactuals are expressed through the “were-subjunctive.” From the
analysis in Chapter 2, we have already noted that Chinese lacks overt grammatical categories
and therefore uses more diverse ways to express counterfactual conditionals. Thus, the real
question is what it is like for high school students to learn the English counterfactual
conditionals on the condition of the lack of overt grammatical categories in their mother
language. Do students display certain kinds of characteristics in the learning process? And
with various forms of the principle, do students at the senior high school level encounter
different degrees of difficulty?
The hypothesized answers for this research question are twofold. The first one is that the
degree of difficulty is the same as the prediction shown in Figure 2. That is, contextually and
syntactically the degree of difficulty is the same. And the second one is that for Chinese EFL
learners, the “were-subjunctive” would be the easiest one to pick up because of its salient form.
Finally, we have a third research question as follows:
(III) How can the errors that Chinese EFL high school students make be categorized
qualitatively and quantitatively, according to the related SLA studies?
The purpose of this research question is to summarize and to categorize the errors that
students make, although it has been noted that not all the sources of errors can be identified. It
is still hoped that some generalizations made from analyzing students’ errors can shed light on
students’ learning process.
4.3 Instruments
A total of 82 subjects were involved in this research. They were students of two
third-grade classes with the same English teacher at a national senior high school in central
Taiwan and their ages ranged from 18 to 19. According to their English teacher, their English
grades in the high school admission examination ranged form 42 point to 60 point (the full
grade) and with the exception of textbooks (Far East version) they used no teaching materials.
It took one class period for all of them to complete the three tasks. The two classes were given
the three tasks at different times during the winter vacation of 2004.
Three experimental tasks were conducted to explore the three research questions of this
study. The three tasks were Situation Task (Task One), Grammaticality Judgment Task (Task
Two) and Elicited Translation Task (Task Three). Before providing a detailed description of
the three tasks, we will briefly discuss their functions.
The Situation Task was used to detect students’ understanding of the appropriate uses
under different contexts. The Grammaticality Judgment Task was conducted to explore
students’ understanding of the forms between non-counterfactual conditionals and
counterfactual ones and finally the purpose of The Elicited Translation Task was to observe
and categorize students’ errors. The relation is shown in the following figure.
Figure 4-1: The functions of the three tasks
On the other hand, if the functions of the tasks are discussed in the comprehension &
production dichotomy, we can find that the Grammaticality Judgment Task and the Situation Elicited Translation Task
test students’ understanding of appropriate contexts
Grammaticality Judgment Task Situation Task
test students’ understanding of form
categorize students’ errors
Task are used to explore the comprehension of the counterfactual conditionals and Elicited
Translation Task is intended for the same purpose of the production. Figure 4-1 will expound
the relation between the three experimental tasks and the research targets.
Figure 4-2: The relation between the three tasks and the comprehension/production dichotomy
In Figure 4-2, the three tasks and the dichotomy do not demonstrate a one to one
correspondence. The reason of such designs is to avoid the possible bias caused by one single
experiment. In the following, more detailed designs of each task will be introduced.
(1) Situation Task
By definition, this task is to put the subjects in a specific situation in which the subjects
have to make a judgment of the appropriateness of a certain structure and therefore a series of
contextual descriptions are designed to evoke certain structures from the subjects. This task
has been used by researchers in the counterfactual study at the senior high school level with
Comprehension Production
Elicited
Translation Task Situation Task
Grammaticality Judgment Task
some modification, testing the proficiency level of students. The target structures are tested
through the form of multi-choice questions (Wu, 2003). And in this study, identical question
types are designed to explore the first research question: Do Chinese EFL learners at the high
school level display difference in their ability to identify the contexts in which the
non-counterfactual or the two types of counterfactual conditionals constructions should be
used? If so, is there a hierarchy of degree of difficulty? Therefore, this task consists of twelve
test items. Eight of them require counterfactual responses and the remaining ones
non-counterfactual. An example of this type of task is given in the following (for the rest of
the task, see Appendix 1).
張三國中時不認真讀書，成績總是不及格，最後就放棄學業，事隔多年之後，某天經過 某某高中校門口，看見某某高中的學生，穿著帥氣的制服，不禁羨慕起來，捶胸頓足地 說，”__________________________________________”可惜，往事有如過往雲煙，永不 復返。
請問這句話是:
( ) (1) If I study harder, I will be able to go to the top high school.
(2) If I studied harder, I would be able to go to the top high school.
(3) If I had studied harder, I would have been able to go to the top high school.
(2) Grammaticality Judgment Task
Grammaticality Judgment Tasks usually are used to detect a speaker’s intuition concerning
the form of a particular sentence. They have been widely used in SLA research (e.g., Liao,
1999; J. C. H. Wu 2001). In this study, in order to explore the second research question: do the
two types of counterfactual conditionals in English (present reference and past reference)
constitute different levels of difficulty for Chinese EFL learners? The task of grammaticality
judgment of the two types of counterfactual conditionals and sentence constructions made up
by mixed counterfactual and non-counterfactual conditionals are presented to the subjects. The
Grammaticality Judgment Task consists of eighteen test items. The design of the task is
summarized below and illustrated in Figure 4-3:
(1) Both the if-clause and the main clause could be one of three types of conditionals (two
types of counterfactual and one type of non-counterfactual conditional). At this point,
we can devise nine test items.
(2) The second step is that the underlined part can be the if-clause or the main clause. After
taking this variable into consideration, we have eighteen test items in total.
Figure 4-3: The design of the Grammaticality Judgment Task
The grading criterion is as follows. Since the subjects are requested to judge the
correctness of the whole sentences based on the underlined parts, it would make more sense if
the scores earned are added to the clause which is not underlined. For example, if subjects If-clause main clause underlined or not
3 × 3 × 2 = 18
answer the following test item number (16) correctly, it would be assumed that he or she can
clearly identify the correctness of the if-clause of the past-referenced counterfactuals. The
score earned would be added to the past-referenced counterfactuals. And in the same vein, if
the subjects correctly answer the test item number (17), the score earned would be added to
the past-referenced counterfactuals as well (for the questionnaire, please refer to Appendix 2)
2.
( F ) If I saw you, I would have invited you. (test item 16)
( T ) If I had seen you, I would have invited you. (test item 17)
(3) Elicited Translation Task
Unlike the previous tasks in which subjects are asked to make judgments, in this task, the
subjects are required to produce their own production data. More specifically, the subjects will
be asked to translate fifteen Chinese sentences with counterfactual and non-counterfactual
interpretations into English equivalents (See Appendix 3)
3. Such a procedure has been
assumed to require both the decoding of the stimulus sentence and the encoding of the
translation, so subjects’ performance will approximate natural speech production
(Larson-Freeman & Long 1984). And then the errors from the translated sentences will be
collected and analyzed. As mentioned earlier in section 2.2.3.2, the theoretical assumption
2 As mentioned in section 4.2, the possible mixed counterfactual conditionals (i.e., a counterfactual sentence with the conditional clause taken from past reference conditional and the main clause from
presence/future) have been excluded in designing this task.
3 There are five translation test items for each kind of the conditionals.
about the role of contexts in this study is that Chinese language can express counterfactuals
without contexts, if certain conditions are met
4. Therefore, the design of task will take into
consideration the two conditions proposed in section 2.2.3.2. That is, the use of time temporal
and internal semantic logic of the meanings
5. The following is an example of this kind:
假如我是你的話，我不會那樣做。(test item 1)
_________________________, I would not do that.
4.4 Procedures
In order to understand how subjects’ general English ability correlates to their learning of
the construction, they were divided into three groups, according to their final grades of English
of last semester. Each of them has roughly the same number of subjects: high achievers’ group
(27 subjects), intermediate achievers’ group (34 subjects) and low achievers’ group (21
4 In the section 2.2.3.2 of Chapter 2 we propose that the use of time temporal and internal semantic logic helps to act as an indicator of counterfactuals.
5According to Li & Thompson’s study (1981), variants of “if” words in Chinese include “如果” (ruguo),”假 如” (jiaru),”假使” (jiashi),and ”要是” (yaoshi). Each of them carries different degrees of hypotheticality. But Li & Thompson do not specify the degree of hypotheticality of the variants of “if” words mentioned above.
When I was designing the Elicited Translation Task, using 如果 as the “if” word in some question stems seems sort of unnatural. Therefore, I choose to use 假如 as the “if” word throughout the Elicited Translation Task.
As for the degree of hypotheticality between 如果 and 假如, 假如 carries a higher degree of hypotheticality and implies a counterfactual condition. The survey in two on-line concordances: VLC website concordance and the concordance of Academia Sinica (中研院平衡語料庫) shows “如果” is used much more frequently than “假如.” The number of example sentences of “如果” in the concordance of Academia Sinica(中研院平衡 語料庫) is 2000 while 341 in VLC website concordance and the number of example sentences of “假如” in the concordance of Academia Sinica (中研院平衡語料庫) is 15 while 7 in VLC website concordance. This finding seems to imply that semantically 如果 is more prototypic than 假如 and therefore it is more neutral in tone.
6 These grades are the average English grades of the group members in the last semester.
subjects). To avoid the Hawthorne effect (Cohen & Manion, 1994), the subjects were not
informed of the purpose of the study in advance.
Table 4-3: Background information of the subjects in the three groups
Groups high achievers’ group Intermediate achieves’ group low achievers’ group
Average grades6 71 62 52
Cutting point Above 66 between65 and 45 Below 44
Male/female 18/9 15/19 8/13
Total 27 34 21
