A Study on Avoidance Behaviors in Chinese-Portuguese Learners’ Oral Production: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

This study focuses on the grammatical avoidance behaviors exhibited by Chinese learners in their oral production of Portuguese. While avoidance has long been a central topic in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), relatively little research has examined the phenomenon within the typologically distant pair of Chinese and Portuguese. Portuguese, with its complex verb inflection system, subjunctive mood, and embedded subordinate structures, poses particular challenges for Chinese learners whose native language is analytic in nature. The study recruited approximately thirty undergraduate students majoring in Chinese–Portuguese Translation at the Macau Polytechnic University, divided into a Macau group and a Mainland China group. The research originally intended to include five oral tasks targeting high-difficulty grammatical structures. However, due to limited research resources and practical constraints, only three tasks were ultimately implemented: subjunctive mood, passive voice, and subordinate/conditional clauses. Data were collected through audio-recorded oral tasks and language background questionnaires, then transcribed, coded, and analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests. Findings reveal that Chinese learners of Portuguese exhibited significant avoidance of the targeted structures, particularly through simplification and substitution with less complex forms. Notably, differences were observed between the two groups: the Macau group displayed a greater tendency to attempt complex structures, albeit with a higher rate of errors, while the Mainland group exhibited a higher overall avoidance rate and adopted more conservative expression strategies. This study confirms the prevalence of grammatical avoidance among Portuguese L2 learners and highlights its pedagogical implications: teachers should increase exposure to complex structures, lower learners’ affective barriers, and provide scaffolding to reduce avoidance. Crucially, instructors should also explicitly raise learners’ awareness of avoidance behaviors, fostering metalinguistic awareness and self-monitoring. It should be noted, however, that the findings are context-specific to Macau and are not intended to be generalized universally.