There have been some articles discussing the acquisition of English plural forms and these studies gave us a general picture of this acquisition process and the problems pupils and teachers encounter. (e.g., Jia, 2003) But some other things can be done further. The first is about mistakes that English beginners are likely to make in their studying. We should examine the causes by analyzing the mistakes pupils make so that we can find effective methods of teaching. This thesis tries to list the mistakes pupils make in the acquisition of English plural forms and analyze the causes. Then some suggestions for teachers to adopt in their teaching are going to be given.

1.2 Research questions

In order to find out the mistakes in English learners’ acquisition of English plural morphemes and analyse the possible causes, this thesis focuses on the following research questions:

a. What mistakes concerning the number of nouns are English beginners likely to make? What are the different types of mistakes?

b．What are the possible causes for the mistakes?

1.3 Objective and scope of the research

The research will focus on English beginners in English primary schools. According to the teaching syllabus of English subject for Chinese primary schools, the knowledge of plural forms is firstly covered in Grade 5, and in Grade 6 pupils will learn all the forms and do some basic exercises. So the participants of the study consist of two classes of pupils from Grade 5 and 6, and the test will be designed according to their textbooks (books of first and second semester of Grade 5 and 6 of PEP) published in 2012 by People’s Education Press. Then according to the participants’ test, the mistakes they make will be collected and classified according to the age and categories. For example, students should memorize some words that have special plural markings or they should consider whether to add correct plural markings according to the words in the sentences.

2. Literature review

Within the scope of linguistics, plural morphemes are a kind of inflectional morphemes without affecting the word’s meaning or class (part of speech) (Wikipedia). They are important in English because plural morphemes have a grammatical function which means that it will affect the learners’ acquisition of grammar in the later learning process. And the plural morpheme is a kind of basic morpheme so many researchers attempt to analyze this acquisition process in the primary or junior high school.

For the acquisition of morphemes, the famous study is done by de Villier and de Billiers. which focuses on the cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech (1973:267). One of the famous studies of acquisition of L2 pupils is the study of native mandarin Chinese- speaking children by Gisela Jia (2003). Her participants are the Chinese-speaking children who immigrated to the United States between ages 5 and 16 years and this study was very representative because the participants were followed for 5 years which could have a strong contrast with the L1 children. And she does find the differences between the error types of L1 and L2 children, of which there are two most mistakes that the learners more frequently mark the same noun inconsistently in the same testing session and more often overgeneralize the plural morpheme in singular of mass noun contexts. And more importantly, the way that the author analyzes the errors types is very clear which includes uses in the obligatory plural context, plural use in the nonplural context. When Chinese researchers study the acquisition of English plural morphemes of English beginners, the impact of the difference between Chinese and English is proved the main reason of the mistakes learners made.(孟丽君,刘景霞,2009) In the article written by Meng Lijun and Liu Jingxia (2009), the authors place emphasis on the negative transfer of the English language. Yang Zhaochun (2013) studies the connection between languages and cognitive competence and we can analysis the reasons of mistakes from this perspective further. Bai Yun(2010) lists some of the hypotheses related to age and second language acquisition and finds out whether it is true that children acquire more than adults in second language. In this study, the author talks about 4 different hypotheses in this field and she has the conclusion that together with other variables, such as learning context, motivation and inpidual strategies, age influences most learners’ learning results. What we can apply her opinions to the study this time is that adults no longer rely on the innate mechanisms for implicit language acquisition; what they do when learning a language is using a series of cognitive skills, and relying instead on these skills to consciously analyze the grammatical structure of the language. So for the acquisition of English plural morphemes, which is a kind of grammatical morpheme in English, the younger pupils use memory most to acquire the grammar of how to add plural markings and the older ones will use more cognitive skills to understand this grammar which will result in big differences of the error types they make in the exercises. As for the difference of the plural markings between Chinese and English, Liu Jie analyzes the Chinese plural morphemes and says that the traditional Chinese grammar seldom talks about the grammar markings except for the use of 们 in Chinese language use.(2009) But none of these researchers goes into the real classroom to get data, and few of them give advice to teachers for the real teaching process. And the age has been proved an important reason of affecting learner’s acquisition that the younger learners tend to be influenced by the zero-plural-markings in Chinese and they often miss the plural markings in English.(胡敏, 2011)