A Study On Syntactic Errors In College English Writing From The Perspective Of Hypotaxis And Parataxis

This thesis analyzes the syntactic errors in college students' English writing from the perspective of hypotaxis and parataxis. As has been demonstrated by scholars in contrastive study of English and Chinese, hypotaxis and parataxis are the most distinguishing features of the two languages. English pays more attention to structure and form while Chinese cares about function and meaning, with the former more precise while the latter more concise. Specifically, English abounds in connectives, prepositions, articles etc, with a fixed sentence structure of Subject-Predicate structure (S-P structure); while in Chinese there are much fewer connectives and prepositions, most of which are dispensable, with no fixed sentence structure. The underlying structure is put by most scholars as Topic-Comment structure (T-C structure).English writing is a key component of college English teaching. So far, there has not been a most effective teaching method. A case study is conducted in this research into the errors in English writing, and the result is that syntactic errors take the biggest proportion of the total errors. They are a major problem even in advanced English learners, which is both inexplicable and upsetting. Therefore, the syntactic errors discovered in the case study are classified and typical errors are picked out to form a test paper for the students. To our surprise, the students show a better capability in correcting their own errors in the test, with most of them correcting at least half of the errors. Lastly, a questionnaire is conducted to find out the relationship of students' attitudes, strategies and their writing scores. The questionnaire focuses on two contrastive aspects—autonomous reflective learning and passive learning dependent on external feedbacks or practices. And it is found out that there is a significant positive correlation between the former one and their writing scores. This illustrates the importance of autonomy in English writing and suggests that the traditional method of giving feedbacks and practices is not effective. Meanwhile, detailed studies of certain items in the questionnaire have been carried out and the results show that high-scorers resort to accumulation of knowledge while low-scorers practices to improve their writing capacity, and more importantly, high-scorers show a stronger tendency to apply noticing during the process of writing.Concerning these results of analysis, this research suggests that the traditional teaching method kernelling teacher's feedback cannot improve students'writing capacities effectively. A teaching method which emphasizes students'autonomy should be applied. Then, a teaching method based on noticing hypothesis is proposed. This hypothesis stresses that students are encouraged to notice the gap between their interlanguages (IL) and target language (TL), through which they can convert the comprehensible input to intake. Though the application of this hypothesis in SLA needs further discussion, many researchers have proved through experiments that noticing plays a significant role in SLA. Moreover, the results of the present study are coherent with this hypothesis. Therefore, a teaching method based on noticing is recommended, which requires that teachers should remind students of typical syntactic errors and to find the answers through their daily practices such as reading, listening, etc, and that students should be trained into a habit of noticing during writing.