Abstract

Pro-drop is a very interesting linguistic phenomenon. It has long been discussed not only in Universal Grammar, but also in second language acquisition. Few studies, however, address the actual use of English [-pro-drop] and Chinese [+pro-drop] by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (Chen 1994a, 1994b; Ou, 1998; Wen & Wu, 1997) and the basis of their judgment. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to understand the effects of English proficiency on the acquisition of English [-pro-drop] parameter and to explore the effects of explicit instruction of [±pro-drop] features. Three experimental tasks, involving a translation task, a grammaticality judgment task and an additional think-aloud task, were implemented. The subjects included 60 Taiwanese EFL learners, all of whom completed these tasks and received explicit instruction of pro-drop parameter (IPP). The current research clearly manifested that most participants, in spite of different English achievements, benefited a lot from IPP. It is thus suggested that English teachers should incorporate explicit instruction of the [±pro-drop] features to raise learners' awareness of the [±pro-drop] features and to familiarize learners with different syntactic patterns in different languages.