At two o’clock in the afternoon on April 17, 2018, Professor Yuan Boping, from the University of Cambridge, came to Shenzhen University to give a lecture to teachers and students in the School of Foreign Languages. The lecture was entitled "Importance of the Syntax -Semantics Interface in the Second Language Acquisition of Chinese Intransitive Verbs: a Survey of English-Speaking Learners of Chinese". In the lecture, Professor Yuan Boping cited studies and classics, and there was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium.
Professor Yuan began his lecture by raising a question: Why is it difficult for adults to acquire the native language level in second language acquisition, while children can easily master it in only five years or less? Then he quoted Bley-Vronman's "essential difference theory" to analyze the various differences between adult and children language development from multiple aspects, and took the use of Chinese intransitive verbs as an example to illustrate the confusion that adults often have in the process of second language acquisition , which then introduced the theme of this lecture: the Syntax -Semantics Interface. Afterwards, Professor Yuan Boping introduced his research done in the UK which is on English-speaking Chinese learners, and showed the results of his research. In the end, teachers and students all had great interest in asking questions and discussing. The lecture was really wonderful, having a strong academic atmosphere.
Finally, with Professor Yuan’s sincere expectations and to the sounds of applause, the academic lecture came to a successful end.
(2018/4/17 Liu Yingying)
