Research On Chinese College Students' Learning Conditions Of English Onomatopoeic Words

Onomatopoeia in English, with abundant types and an enormous number, is widely used in daily life. However, through personal experience, we find out the shortage of commanding these onomatopoeic words when learning and speaking English, so we decide to figure out the current study situations of university students' command and practical use of onomatopoeia in English by use of field survey.With the combination of network questionnaire survey and traditional written questionnaire survey, we investigate college students' general study attitude to onomatopoeia in English, the oral and written use conditions, and the understanding of written meaning and the transferred meaning of them. Using the contrast knowledge of onomatopoeia between English and Chinese, and the inter-language during second language learning, we analyze the accumulated original corpus, and get to know college students's command and application of onomatopoeia in English.Through the analysis of the original corpus, we figure out that actually college students have no idea of what onomatopoeia is. Most of our interviewees,who passed CET4 or even CET6,knew little about it. The research findings are as follows :they are narrow-minded with the conception of onomatopoeia;they have very limit application capabilities in both oral and written English;they know little about the transferred meanings of onomatopoeia. All of the above questions are mainly caused by the following aspects: negative transfer from mother tongue; negative transfer from target language;not been emphasized in the teaching process;not been emphasized in the learning process .In order to solve these problems, we, through the analysis of original corpus and the cause of their mistakes in applying onomatopoeia, and interviewing with college students,come up with the following teaching advice:firstly,emphasize the input in teching;secondly,enhance English-Chinese contrastive study;thirdly,introduce some translation techniques to the students;last but not least, emphasize practising in both oral and written English.