Theory and practice in language studies

Theory and Practice in Language Studies ISSN 1799-2591 Volume 2, Number 1, January 2012 Contents REGULAR PAPERS Constraint on Merge: The Roots of the Lexical/Functional Divide Ludovico Franco An Investigation of Chinese Students’ Learning Styles at an English-medium University in Mainland China Chili Li A Short Analysis of Insertion in Persian Masoud Dehghan and Aliyeh Kord-e Zafaranlu Kambuziya 14 A Study of the Social Ecological Wisdom in H.W Longfellow’s Poetry Jingcheng Xu and Meifang Nan Gong 24 Measuring Balanced Bilingual Children with Sentence-embedded Word Translation Shin-Mei Kao and Ferenc J Pintér 31 Readability of Texts: State of the Art Mostafa Zamanian and Pooneh Heydari 43 On the Arbitrary Nature of Linguistic Sign Manfu Duan 54 The Correlation between General Self-Confidence and Academic Achievement in the Oral Presentation Course Safaa Mohammad Al-Hebaish 60 A Contrastive Study of L1 and L2 Acquisition Ahmad Moinzadeh, Salman Dezhara, and Omid Rezaei 66 A Tentative Analysis of English Film Translation Characteristics and Principles Yan Chang 71 A Review of the History of Translation Studies Ali Reza Ghanooni 77 Effect of Task Experience on Iranian EFL Learners’ Level of Anxiety and Performance on Taskbased Tests Khalil Motallebzadeh, Sepideh Mirzaee, and Purya Baghaei 86 Cross-cultural Competence and Its Development Yanbin Qin 92 Register Variation and the Multi-word Item Alexandra Uzoaku Esimaje 97 The Effects on Reading Comprehension of Lexical Collocation Instruction, Subject Matter Knowledge, and Cultural Schema Mansoor Ganji 105 Teaching Multiliteracies: A Research Based on Multimodality in a PPT Presentation Ji Song 113 The Yutong Bus: Representations of a New Ghanaian Political Metaphor Eric Opoku Mensah 118 The Analysis of English-Persian Legal Translations Based on Systemic Functional Grammar Approach (SFG) Ferdows Aghagolzadeh and Faezeh Farazandeh-pour 126 Cooperative Principle in English and Chinese Cultures Yuanxiu He 132 A Review on IELTS Writing Test, Its Test Results and Inter Rater Reliability Veeramuthu a/l Veerappan and Tajularipin Sulaiman 138 The Effects of Two Pre-task Activities on Improvement of Iranian EFL Learners' Listening Comprehension Farahman Farrokhi and Vahideh Modarres 144 Lexical Formation Rules and Chatting Language Online in English Li Ruan 151 Learning English Conditional Structures Luu Trong Tuan 156 The Comparative Study on English and Chinese Intonation Qi Pan 161 The Efficiency of Extensive Reading Project (ERP) in an Iranian EFL Context Ali Asghar Kargar 165 A Study on the Formalization of English Subjunctive Mood Xiaowei Guan 170 Testing and Technology: Past, Present and Future Salma Parhizgar 174 On Interrelations between Language Teaching and Speech Teaching Xianmei Sun 179 The Issue of Translating Culture: A Literary Case in Focus Azizollah Dabaghi and Mohammad Bagheri 183 The Influence of Computer Applied Learning Environment on EFL or ESL Education Rucheng Li 187 ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol 2, No 1, pp 1-5, January 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland doi:10.4304/tpls.2.1.1-5 Constraint on Merge: The Roots of the Lexical/Functional Divide Ludovico Franco University of Venice, Italy Email: franco.ludovico@gmail.com Abstract—This paper addresses the following questions: is (external) merge, the binary operation that combines two elements into a constituent in every variant of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1993, 1995 and related works), an unconstrained operation? If so, what avoid generating ill-formed structures? I will argue here for a simple functional / lexical constraint on Merge, assuming a possible principled binary opposition for the items which enter the syntactic derivation I will basically follow Kayne (2009), who assumes that the class of nouns (or L-roots) is the only open (lexical) class in grammar, updating the intuitions of Hale and Keyser (1993) This proposal leads to interesting structural and typological consequences Index Terms—merge, minimalist program, lexicon, biolinguistics, morpho-syntax I INTRODUCTION This work aims at investigating the properties of Merge, the operation that builds syntactic structures in the Minimalist program (Chomsky 1995, and related works) I will argue here that Merge, assumed to be the easiest, the first and, arguably, the only, step by which syntactic derivations take place is not a free step, once given a Numeration (see, for an alternative constraining hypothesis, Di Sciullo and Isac, 2008) I will hypothesize a simple functional / lexical constraint on (external) Merge, assuming a possible principled dichotomy / binary opposition (weakly relying on classic works in other subfields of grammar such as Jacobson and Halle, 1956) for all the items which enter the syntactic derivation The main inspirational works for the present proposal are (i) a recent paper by Richard Kayne (2009), which updates the intuitions of Hale and Keyser (1993) and assumes that the class of nouns is the only open (lexical) class in grammar; (ii) some recent Cartographic proposals (see Cinque, 2005; Cinque, 2010a; and for introductory purposes, Cinque and Rizzi, 2010); (iii) more broadly, those paradigms which assume that the elements within syntax and within morphology enter into the same kind of constituent structures (e.g can be sketched via binary branching trees), such as Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993), the unifying paradigm of Manzini and Savoia (2006) or Nanosyntax (Starke, 2009; Caha, 2009) Intuitively, approaching the architecture of the human faculty of language from its basis, a principle involved in a directional/constrained Merge must be necessarily simple and economic, and can be introduced as follow Let‟s assume that our Lexicon stores only (underspecified, to some extent) lexical roots (let‟s call them nouns in an unorthodox fashion; see Barner and Bale, 2002 for a psycholinguistic anchorage): as for Merge, which combines items in syntax, a lexical root can target only a features‟ sets or functional item(s) and not viceversa: functional items can Merge to other functional items, leading to functional ordered sequences Hence, root Merge root is banned (leading, at most, to exocentricity in compounds, see Progovac, 2009), while sequences of grammatical words, which crucially build syntax (see the fseq of Nanosyntactic paradigm), are allowed Traditionally, functional items are those syntactic heads which are not defined in terms of [+Noun ; +Verb], marking grammatical or relational features, rather than picking out a class of objects (Abney, 1987) Basically, if we assume that (only) functional items build syntax, we must say that lexical roots are inert in grammar: they not project That is the proposal in Kayne (2009), in which it is also argued that all verbs are functional light verbs (see also Franco et al 2010, for clinical evidence from an anomic patient affected by Primary Progressive Aphasia, a degenerative syndrome marked by progressive deterioration of language functions and relative preservation of other cognitive domain) This is a basic fact, in order to implement a constrained Merge model Thus, here, I will assume that only nouns, as lexical primitives, are inert Since Jespersen (1965) the term “light verb” is a label used to refer to a class of verbs which is supposed to be semantically empty, thus lacking enough thematic strength to independently act as predicates Notice that many languages fails to incorporate the noun into a light verb, so that most „verbal meanings‟ are expressed as V+N periphrases (see Amberber, Baker and Harley, 2010), probably demonstrating that most transitive and inergative verbs are not primitive but result from the incorporation of a noun into a limited class of light/general purpose verbs (e.g „do‟, „give‟, „take‟, „put‟, „hit‟), and even the class of these primitive verbs may turn out to be closed and relatively small (Folli, Harley and Karimi, 2005; Cinque and Rizzi, 2010) One of such light verb languages is Persian, which is a crucial case also because it has been convincingly argued (Ghomeshi 1997) that Persian nouns © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES (remember: the only open class, according to our proposal) are non-projecting items Notice that the not uncontroversial claim of a unique set of (nominal) roots, which go beyond traditional categories, finds many typological confirms also for other (alleged) open classes of items (Baker, 2003): in many languages it has been observed, for instance, that adjectives or adverbs can constitute a closed, often quite small class of elements (Dixon, 2004) This brief paper is structured as follows After an overall view on Merge, I will sketch my proposal from a structural viewpoint Then, I will try to briefly show that a constrained Merge can easily explain in an economic way grammaticalization patterns (clines, see Heine and Kuteva, 2002; Von Fintel, 1995; Longobardi, 2004) and typological rarities Notice that I am aware that, “despite the numerous attempts to uncover the principle(s) governing grammatical relations/orders, the concomitant demand of empirical accuracy with respect to actual languages, has reduced virtually all of the correlations proposed to mere statistical tendencies” (Cinque, 2010b, p.1) which are – however – interesting by themselves Notice also that here, I will not address more technical details about Merge - given the simple constraint proposed - concerning e.g the locality (topology) of the relations, and the interpretability of features (Collins, 2002; Bowers, 2010; Franco, 2008) Finally, notice that in a related work under development (Franco 2011b), it will be addressed a problematic case study, exocentric compounds, melting up theoretical claims about their status and empirical evidence from clinical linguistics (see, for introductory purposes, Semenza and Mondini, 2006) II MERGE Syntactic structures in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) are built bottom-up by the operation Merge, which has two fundamental properties: (a) it is a binary operation, which combines two items into a constituent, and (b) it is recursive, so that the its output may subsequently be submitted to another Merge with other elements yielding a further syntactic unit In the Minimalist program all the elements that are subjected to Merge are drawn from a set (namely, a list) called the Numeration A Numeration is defined as a set of minimal pairs, a lexical item and an index, who signals the number of instances of the item along the derivation Whenever items are selected from the Numeration in order to enter the syntactic derivation, their indices reduce by one The derivation ends when every index scales down to zero Hence, syntax seems to be very simple, economic This iterative operation of Merge is the sole responsible for building up syntactic structures (from bottom to top): the fist input to the initial application of Merge consists of terminal items, and the last output of the final application of Merge expresses a hierarchical structure The triggering step is illustrated below in (1): (1) MERGE (α, β) {α, β}  {α, {α, β}} Thus, Merge combines the input objects into a set As an immediate consequence, it forms a hierarchy: the original input objects are directly included in the output object (de Vries, 2009) III CONSTRAINT My proposal is the following: Merge is principled and it is sensitive to categories in a broad sense Let‟s hypothesize that the only valuable distinction in grammar is between functional and lexical categories Merge operates as a filter and bans all its applications that impair a syntactic derivation Thus, if we label √ lexical items and  functional items, Merge works as follow: (2) a Merge (α, √) {α, √} {α, {α, √}}  output Ok b Merge (α, α) {α, α} {α, {α, α}} or {fseq}  output Ok c Merge (α, √) {α, √} {√, {α, √}} bad output d Merge (√,√) {√, √} {√, {√, √}}  bad output The combinations represented above get three crucial points: i) coherently with Kayne (2009) recent updates of Antisymmetry (for which Cinque, 2005; 2010 has given very strong typological evidence) lexical (denotational) items are not able to project; ii) merge between √ items does not allow for syntactic derivations and probably if a combination of that kind is possible, it pertains to morphology, as with the example of the above-mentioned exocentric compounds; iii) ordered sequences of functional items (projecting heads) build grammar, which is coherent with promising paradigms within the contemporary theoretical linguistics, such as Cartography or Nanosyntax In order to work, my proposal has to make a not uncontroversial assumption: verbs not exist, or in a less dramatic form, all verbs are light verbs This belief has originated from the seminal works of Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002), it has been radically retrieved in the work of Kayne (2009) and it has been effectively interpreted in Cinque and Rizzi (2010) as a putative principle of cartographic researches Many structural questions can arise from the present hypothesis However, further technical details will be omitted here because not relevant For those who are interested, you can refer to Franco (2011a) IV SOME NOTES ON GRAMMATICALIZATION The proposal outlined above - leaving aside here structural questions involved within the generative framework (e.g asymmetry, dominance/hierarchy, selection, etc.) and handled, as said, elsewhere - aims at providing possible unifying © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES answers related to various phenomena in subfields such as: i) language evolution and diachronical explanation; ii) statistical tendency in linguistic typology, with particular regards to implicational universals; iii) language acquisition and language loss; iv) language contact (e.g how can a language absorb loan words into a native Lexicon?) In this section I will briefly introduce the phenomenon of grammaticalization, trying to show that it is probably the most important factor for language evolution Grammaticalization is the historical development of function morphemes from lexical morphemes One of the crucial properties of functional morphemes is that, in any natural language, their inventory is limited, as opposed to the virtually infinite lexicon of content items (Abney, 1987; Von Fintel 1995) A list of some important kinds of functional morphemes, taken from Kay von Fintel (1995, p.176), may give an idea of what we are dealing with: (3) Noun Class - Gender - Number - Determiner - Quantifier - Case - Verb Class -Voice - Aspect - Tense - Modality Negation - Complementizer - Conjunction - ‘Wh’-Elements - Degree Words - Comparative – Superlative The notion of functional categories was introduced into the generative paradigm by the works of Fukui and Speas (1986) and Fukui (1986) Given the set in (3) it seems that “functional categories are what grammar is all about” (Von Fintel, 1995, p 176) This intuition has been framed as a principle of natural languages: grammatically relevant crosslinguistic differences are confined to the properties of functional morphemes, but there must be an underlying regular pattern A constrained version of Merge as given in (2) is, possibly, the more economical layout, if we consider Merge as the basic operation of language Grammaticalization seems to be a unidirectional process and the counterexamples cited, for instance, in Norde (2009) are not unambiguous Heine and Kuteva (2002) wrote that "grammaticalization is a unidirectional process, that is, it leads from less grammatical to more grammatical forms and constructions (p.4)” This process, following Hopper and Traugott, 1993) may be interpreted as in (4): (4) content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix In our view this process (cline) may be the phylogenetic proof of a syntactic “Big Bang”, triggered by functional morphemes and it is essential for the study of language evolution We think that, having in mind what is relevant for syntax and the hypothesis in (2), we may restate (4) as follows: (5) √ > α >  Guglielmo Cinque (2010b) has pointed out that the notion of ideal language(s) may be restated in terms of amount of movement of constituents (no movement vs the most possible movement) From an asymmetric Merge perspective the ideal language would be the either (i) a radically analytic language, such as for example Riau Indonesia (described in Gil, 2004) or (ii) a radically polysynthetic language, such as Mohawk (described in Baker, 2001) In other words: (i) every functional morpheme presupposed vs (ii) no presupposition at all (as concern for the inventory of functional categories in a given language, due to a grammaticalization process such as the one depicted in (5)) Since Pollock‟s (1989) classical work, it has been postulated an abstract set of functional (un-spelled/presupposed) projections (e.g by the means of the existence of certain systematic word order differences among languages) Without entering into technical details, notice that our model fits the evidence of antisymmetric theory quite well, because it assumes that a lexical specifier and a lexical complement cannot be spelled out/linearized/parsed when adjacent Hence, adjacency plays a role in grammar, contrary to common evidence, in the sense that it triggers a syntactic derivation, implying the necessity to avoid {√, √} (for a partially analogous proposal see the dynamic model of Moro 2000; 2008) V TRIGGERING EMPIRICAL ISSUES This idea, utterly speculative at first sight, can actually address interesting typological phenomena, otherwise quite unexplainable One example could be provided by the morphosyntactic behavior, described in Heath (2007), of some languages of the Songhay family (a West-African language family of Mali), in which are present bidirectional case markers that specify both that the NP to the left is a subject and that the NP to the right is an object, without being bracketed uniquely with either Another example, among many others, could be given by coverbs, as described for instance for the Australian language Jaminjung (Schultze-Berndt 2000; 2001) In Jaminjung coverbs form complex predicates with inflecting verbs, but can also act as main predicates in a clause subordinated by means of a case marker However, coverbs constitute a distinct part of speech from nominals, which, unlike coverbs, take the full set of case markers and may occur in a noun phrase together with determiners or attributive adjectival nominals (Schultze-Berndt, 2000) Probably, they are, in our model, the best approximation of a pure √ (root) Furthermore, it is interesting to observe that also in Indo-European languages, such as Persian, are present underspecified “mismatching” words (Karimi-Doostan, 2011), that seem to function as roots, when isolated / unmerged with a functional complements A constrained version of Merge could also explain, from my viewpoint, universal tendencies in the morpho-syntax of language, from a typological viewpoint, investigating e.g some Greenberg Universals (Greenberg, 1963), or make a basis for interesting recent investigation within the generative framework on hierarchical universals (see the Final over Final Constraint, assumed by Biberauer et al 2010) Refer to Franco (2011a) if interested in the underlying argumentations © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES VI CONCLUSION In this brief paper I have proposed that Merge, the operation that builds syntax in the Minimalist program is principled and it is sensitive to categories in a broad sense I have proposed that the only valuable distinction (binary opposition) in grammar is between functional and lexical categories Merge operates as a filter and bans all its applications that crash a syntactic derivation The only possible array is among functional categories, creating a functional sequence (fseq) This is coherent with challenging recent paradigms in theoretical syntax such as Cartography and Nanosyntax REFERENCES [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] Abney, S (1987) The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect, Ph.D dissertation, MIT Amberber, M., Baker, B & M Harvey (2010) Complex predicates: cross-linguistic perspectives on event structure Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Baker, M (2001) The atoms of language New York: Basic Books Barner D & A Bale (2002) No nouns, no verbs: Psycholinguistic arguments in favor of lexical underspecification Lingua, 112, 771-791 Biberauer, T., A Holmberg & I Roberts (2010) A syntactic universal and its consequences Ms, Universities of Cambridge and Newcastle Bowers J (2010) Arguments as relations Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Caha, P (2009) The Nanosyntax of Case Ph.D dissertation, University of Tromsø Chomsky, N (1986) Barriers Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Chomsky, N (1995) The Minimalist Program Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Cinque, G (2005) Deriving Greenberg‟s universal 20 and its exceptions, Linguistic Inquiry, 36, 315-332 Cinque, G (2010a) The syntax of adjectives A comparative study Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Cinque, G (2010b) Word Order Typology A Change of Perspective, ms Universitàdi Venezia Cinque, G & L Rizzi (2010) The cartography of syntactic structures In B Heine & H Narrog (eds.), Oxford Handbook of linguistic analysis (pp 51-65), Oxford: Oxford University press, 51-65 Collins, C 2002 Eliminating labels, in S.D Epstein & T.D Seely (eds.) Derivation and explanation in the minimalist program, Oxford: Blackwell, 42-64 Di Sciullo, A M & D Isac (2008) The asymmetry of merge Biolinguistics 2, 260–290 Dixon, R M W (2004) Adjective classes in typological perspective In R M W Dixon & A Y Aikhenvald (eds.), Adjective classes Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-45 Fintel, K von (1995) The formal semantics of grammaticalization In Proceedings of NELS 25: Workshop on Language Change, 175-189 Folli, R., Harley H & S Karimi (2005) Determinants of event structure in Persian complex predicates Lingua 115,1365-1401 Franco, L (2008) Graph Theory and Universal Grammar, Ph.D dissertation, Universitàdi Firenze Franco, L (2011a) The strict asymmetry of Merge ms Università Ca‟ Foscari, Venezia Franco, L (2011b) Exocentric compounds, syntax and asymmetric Merge ms Università Ca‟ Foscari, Venezia Franco L., Zampieri, E., Garzon, M., Meneghello, F., Cardinaletti, A & C Semenza (2010) Noun-Verb Distinction as a Consequence of Antisymmetry: Evidence from Primary Progressive Aphasia Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 6, 45–46 Fukui, N (1986) A theory of category projection and its application Ph.D dissertation, MIT Fukui, N & Speas, P (1986) A theory of category projection and its applications, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 128172 Ghomeshi, J (1997) Non-projecting nouns and the ezafe construction in Persian Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15, 729–788 Gil, D (2004) Riau Indonesian sama: Explorations in macrofunctionality In M Haspelmath, (ed.) Coordinating Constructions Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 371-424 Greenberg, J (1963) Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements In J Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 73–113 Jespersen, O (1965) A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principle London: George & Unwin Hale K & S J Keyser (1993) On argument structure and the lexical expression of grammatical relations In K Hale & S J Keyser (eds.), The view from Building 20, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 53-109 Hale K & S J Keyser (2002) Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Halle, M., & Marantz, A (1993) Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection In K Hale & S J Keyser (eds.), The view from Building 20, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 111-176 Heat, J (2007) Bidirectional Case-marking and Linear Adjacency Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25, 83-101 Heine, B & T Kuteva (2002) World Lexicon of Grammaticalization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hopper, P J & E Traugott (2003) Grammaticalization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Jakobson, R & M Halle (1956) Fundamentals of language The Hague: Mouton Karimi-Doostan, Gh (2011) Lexical categories in Persian, Lingua 121, 207-220 Kayne, R (2009) Antisymmetry and the Lexicon, Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2008, 1–32 Longobardi, G (2004) Formal Syntax, Diachronic Minimalism, and Etymology: The History of French Chez Linguistic Inquiry 32, 275-302 Manzini, M.R & L.M Savoia (2007) A unification of morphology and syntax Studies in Romance and Albanian dialects London: Routledge © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] Moro, A (2000) Dynamic Antisymmetry Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Moro, A (2008) The Boundaries of Babel The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Norde, M (2009) Degrammaticalization Oxford: Oxford University press Progovac, L (2009) Layering of grammar: Vestiges of proto-syntax in present-day languages In G Sampson, D Gil & P Trudgill (eds.), Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 203–212 Schultze-Berndt, E (2000) Simple and complex verbs in Jaminjung: A study of event categorization in an Australian language Ph.D dissertation, Radboud University, MPI Series in Psycholinguistics Schultze-Berndt, E (2001) Ideophone-like characteristics of uninflecting predicates in Jaminjung (Australia) In F K E Voeltz & C Kilian-Hatz (eds.) Ideophones Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 355-373 Semenza, C & S Mondini, (2006) Neuropsychology of compound words In G Libben & G Jarema (eds.), The representation and processing of compound words Oxford: Oxford University press, 71-95 Starke, M (2009) Nanosyntax: A short primer to a new approach to language, Nordlyd, 36, 2-6 Vries, M de (2009) On Multidominance and Linearization Biolinguistics 3, 344–403 Ludovico Franco received his MA degree in Linguistics from the University of Siena, Italy in 2005 He obtained a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Florence in 2008 He is currently an ESF PhD fellow at the University Ca' Foscari of Venice, performing researches in the field of neurolinguistics, with particular regard to experimental and theoretical morpho-syntax © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol 2, No 1, pp 6-13, January 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland doi:10.4304/tpls.2.1.6-13 An Investigation of Chinese Students’ Learning Styles at an English-medium University in Mainland China Chili Li School of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Email: sundaylcl@126.com Abstract—This paper reports on an investigation of Chinese tertiary students’ perceptual learning styles at an English-medium university in mainland China Results revealed that 1) a wide variety of learning styles was distributed among Chinese EFL students, a majority of them favoring tactile, kinesthetic, and visual learning styles; 2) gender differences existed but were not statistically significant in the learning-style preferences between male and female students; 3) English majors and Non-English majors showed statistically significant differences in their tactile learning and kinesthetic learning; 4) English majors differed significantly from Non-English majors in their tactile learning and kinesthetic learning; 5) postgraduates and undergraduates were significantly different in their preferences for auditory learning and individual learning These results provided insightful implications for tertiary English teaching in China Index Terms—learning styles, English-medium University, EFL teaching and learning I INTRODUCTION As the first Sino-foreign joint university in China, the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China (UNNC) has drawn great attention from the educational specialists both abroad and at home for its practice of applying English as the medium of working language and its operation of the British educational system The approach to teaching at UNNC is shaped from the model of its mother university, the University of Nottingham, UK (UNUK) Students are partly taught in large lecture groups and partly in smaller seminar groups of around 15-20 students They are encouraged to take a deep approach to learning and to become independent learners who know how to research, analyze and present the key issues of their chosen discipline They can access to the internet resources of the home campus in the UK Courses are delivered entirely in English All the curricula are based on its needs analysis of the development of Chinese society, education as well as learners’ personal development conducted by the UNUK before its coming into China (Chen, 2006) Besides, this model is underpinned by the staff who are native speakers of English and whose teaching is directly informed by their research It can be seen that the teaching beliefs and styles, and the needs analysis of the Nottingham model reflect the student-centered nature of the British educational system Efforts have been made to explore the practice of the British educational system in the Chinese EFL context, particularly its Orientation system (Chen, 2006) and its supporting system of self-accessing learning (Cai, 2008), which reflect the nature of the student-centered approach However, there is paucity to date to explore the characteristics of Chinese university students’ learning styles at the English-medium environment in mainland China This paper thus attempts to bridge this gap by examining the Chinese university students’ learning styles at UNNC II LITERATURE REVIEW Learning style is thought of as learners’ preferred way of dealing with information Reid (2002) defines it as "natural, habitual, and preferred way(s) of absorbing, processing, retaining new information and skills" and categorizes styles into six types-Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Tactile, Group, and Individual A large body of literature in the West and at home has investigated the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ learning styles under different contexts (e.g., Dunn, 1990; Felder, 1995; Peacock, 2001) Reid (1987) studied the preferred learning styles of the Chinese EFL students studying in the U.S universities and reported that they demonstrated multiple major learning style preferences, preferred kinaesthetic learning styles most and group learning style least This is finding is evidenced in later research Melton (1990) administered a survey among students from Chinese universities and found that they favored Kinesthetic, Tactile and Individual styles, but disfavored group styles In their research, Coffield, et al (2004) reported that the implications of learning styles for language teaching and learning were serious and thus should be of concern to both learners and teachers Compared to the West, research on learning styles in China began much later However, there are a proliferation of empirical studies at home, mainly exploring students’ learning style preference under the Chinese EFL context and the implications English teaching and learning in China (e.g Liu, et al, 2004; Li & Su, 2007; Lǚ, et al, 2009; etc) Meanwhile, other Chinese Language practitioners and researchers expand the research scope of EFL learning style © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES from various aspects For instance, Li and Bi (2006) argued that students’ English learning outcomes were to a large degree affected by their learning style preference Zhang (2008) discussed the implication of learning styles for English teaching in EFL classroom and advocated that the design of College English class be based on students’ learning style The aforementioned literature reveals that the past studies were administered either under the Western educational context or under the Chinese EFL context To date no initiative has been made to investigate the features of those EFL students at English-medium universities in mainland China The present research thus attempts to bridge this gap by studying the characteristics of this cohort of students’ learning styles at the English-medium University in mainland China, with a hope of promoting classroom English teaching at Chinese universities III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY A Research Questions This study addressed the following questions: 1) What is the feature of the Chinese university students’ learning styles at UNNC? 2) Are there any style differences between male and female students? 3) Do English majors vary from non-English majors in their learning style preferences? 4) Do postgraduate students learn differently from undergraduate students? B Participants The survey was administered with 92 participants from UNNC These participants were composed of 59 undergraduates and 33 postgraduates from various majors including International Business, International Communications, Management, Finance, International Studies, and Applied Linguistics There were 56 female students and 36 male students, 20 of whom were English majors and 72 were non-English majors C Instruments The present study employed Reid’s (1987) Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (PLSPQ) to measure the participants’ learning-style preferences This questionnaire is the most widely used instrument for non-native speakers of English (DeCapua & Wintergest, 2004) As a well-tested instrument (Peacock, 2001), it has been proven to be highly valid and reliable In Cheng’s (1997) study, for instance, the reliability of PLSPQ was as high as 0.81 using Cronbach’s alpha The instrument consists of three sections The first section is the directions telling the participants the purpose of doing this survey and how to respond to the questions, including their personal information, namely, their gender, major, and grade The second section has 30 statements covering six learning-style categories: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, individual and group learning The third section is the self-scoring sheet for students to report their style preferences D Data Collection and Analysis The questionnaire was administered after class at the end of the second semester of the 2007-2008 academic year under my supervision The collected data were computed through Statistical Package for Social Science 16.0 (SPSS 16.0) In response to the proposed research questions, the collected data were analyzed in the following steps: the statistics were first described to report the results and findings of the overall characteristics of learning styles among all the participants Then, the data were further interpreted from the perspectives of gender, major, and grade T-Test was made in order to indentify whether and how the differences in learning style preferences were significant between male and female students, English and non-English majors, and postgraduates and undergraduates since the postgraduates already have had more years’ experience of learning English at college than the undergraduates IV RESULTS A The Participants’ Overall Learning Styles Table-1 illustrated the overall characteristics of the participants’ learning styles It can be noted that there was a stronger distribution tendency among the participants who showed a wider and more diversified stylistic preferences in their learning, compared with that under the Chinese EFL context (e.g., Liu, et al, 2004) The students who preferred tactile learning shared the highest mean value, while those students who used visual learning more frequently and those who favored kinesthetic learning shared the same mean value, which was the second highest mean value Then it was followed by the auditory learners, and the individual learners The learners who favored group learning shared the lowest mean value © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER THEORY AND PRACTICE IN LANGUAGE STUDIES Style visual tactile auditory group kinesthetic individual TABLE-1 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS OF THE PARTICIPANTS’ LEARNING STYLES Number Mean 92 36.7826 92 37.8913 92 35.3696 92 33.6522 92 36.7826 92 34.3043 Std Deviation 5.80986 5.20662 4.68741 6.12406 5.72603 6.84481 A further interesting finding is that the most favored learning style reported by the participants was tactile learning, with kinesthetic and visual learning styles being slightly less favored The participants favored least individual learning and group learning These findings were echoed in the results of some earlier studies (e.g., Reid, 1987, Melton, 1990, Rossi-Le, 2002) which reported that Chinese university EFL students favored kinesthetic and tactile learning styles most and disfavored group styles Another important feature is that the six Standard Deviation values for these six dimensions of perceptual learning style preference indicate that these learning styles were distributed widely and variedly among the participants However, there are specific differences according to the particular Standard Deviation for each learning style The relatively lower Standard Deviation of auditory style (Std Deviation=4.68741) showed that the auditory learners were more homogeneous in this learning style, while the relatively higher Standard Deviation of group learning (Std Deviation=6.12406) and individual learning (Std Deviation=6.84481) indicated that these two learning styles were distributed more variedly and strikingly among the participants B Gender Differences and Learning Styles Table-2 provided the following findings: obvious differences can be observed in mean values between female and male students in individual learning, visual learning, and group learning respectively, in which male students reported a higher mean value than female students On the other hand, the two groups demonstrated very close mean values in tactile learning, auditory learning, and kinesthetic learning, though female students showed a slightly higher mean value than the male students in these three learning styles However, the T-Test (Table-3) showed that all the P values were above the 0.05 level (P＞0.05) among these six styles, which means that though differences existed between male and female students, these differences were not statistically significant The above statistical descriptions can be interpreted as follows: gender differences exist in the learning style preference of male students and female students, but these differences are not statistically significant Male students prefer individual learning, visual learning, and group learning in comparison with female students They learn considerably differently from each other in these three learning styles Style visual tactile auditory group kinesthetic individual Style visual tactile auditory group kinesthetic individual TABLE-2 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS OF GENDER IN RELATION TO LEARNING STYLES Gender Number Mean Female 56 36.0357 Male 36 37.9444 Female 56 37.9286 Male 36 37.8333 Female 56 35.4286 Male 36 35.2778 Female 56 32.9643 Male 36 34.7222 Female 56 36.9286 Male 36 36.5556 Female 56 33.3929 Male 36 35.7222 TABLE-3 INDEPENDENT SAMPLE TEST OF GENDER IN RELATION TO LEARNING STYLES t df Sig.(2-tailed) -1.55 90 125 085 90 932 150 90 881 -1.35 90 180 303 90 762 -1.607 90 112 *significant at p