An Analysis Of Chinglish In English Compositions Written By Chinese University Students

Chinglish, a linguistic term used in English teaching, is a system of interlanguage between Chinese mother tongue and English target language used by English learners of Chinese when they haven't mastered Standard English. It is viewed as unacceptable or incompatible in English teaching with the intention of teaching Standard English. The origin of Chinglish error is that Chinese students have a tendency to transplant the Chinese semantic and cultural structures into English expressions word for word or sentence for sentence to make up the inadequacies in their knowledge of English semantic and cultural structures. Chinglish is an inevitable mental disposition and linguistic phenomenon in the process of Chinese students learning English and involves a great deal of cultural and language transfer of Chinese. Chinglish discussed here is influenced by the negative transfer from the native language,semantically ill-formed but syntactically well-formed in English compositions written by Chinese university students. Analysis of such kind of errors is of practical meaning to English teaching and to improve students' English writing ability.In determining the acceptability of an utterance we have to assess independently the well-formedness of the semantic and syntactic representations and the cultural connotation carried by language. Based on the concrete analysis of the living examples from three tiers: lexical meaning, sentence structure, and cultural transfer, the thesis makes a series of predictions about the categories of Chinglish errors which seem grammatically correct while semantically unacceptable to the native speakers of English from the consideration of semantic contrasts and syntactic contrasts. The identification and explanation of Chinglish errors provide information about the learning processes, learning strategies and learning procedures of Chinese students learning English. That understanding will provides the teachers with the main source of information about how Chinglish errors take place and therefore help students to overcome Chinglish and master the Standard English.