A Contrastive Study On The Errors In Primary School Students' Chinese Writings And Junior Middle School Students' English Writings

This study is attempting to apply contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theories to contrastively study the characteristics and the categories of JMSSs'English writing errors and the PSSs'Chinese writing errors. Through a large number of studies on errors have been conducted, the author intend to explore the relationship between FLA and SLA.There are two key research questions in this study: 1. What are the most common errors committed by PSSs in their Chinese writing, what are the most common errors committed by JMSSs in their English writings? Are there any difference between the Chinese writing errors and the English writing errors, if there is any, can we explain them using Language learning theory? 2. What are the possible causes of committing these errors,what are the differences between the causes of L1 errors and the cause of L2 errors?In this study, the subjects are 160 students in Grade 3 at No.4 Primary School in Lanzhou and 160 students in Grade 3 at No.2 middle school attached at Northwest Normal University. In order to study the errors committed by the PSSs and the JMSSs in both a qualitative way and a quantitative way, the author collected the terminal examination compositions written by the PSSs and the JMSSs in July, 2008s. The statistical analyses will conduct by using SPSS (13.5) and Microsoft Excel Software Package for Social Science (SPSS). The data analyses yielded the following findings:1. The data analyses show that: (1) The errors committed by the PSSs in their Chinese writings are 2400, of all these errors, grammar errors rank the first, which is 972 in number, about 40.5% of the total; 751 lexical errors follows, accounting for 31.9% of the total, the number of the errors in discourse is about 28.6% of the total. (2) The errors committed by the JMSSs in their English writings are 2358, of all these errors, lexical errors rank the first, which is 978 in number, about 39.26% of the total, 732 discourse errors follows, accounting for 30.95% of the total, the errors in grammar about 29.43% of the total. (3) According to the contrastive study, it incated that, in PSSs'Chinese writings, grammar errors rank the first, about 40.5% of the total, lexical errors and discourse errors follow, about 31.9% and 28.6% of the total respectively; In JMSSs'English writings, however, lexical errors rank the first, about 39.26% of the total, discourse errors and grammar errors follow, about 30.95% and 29.43% of the total respectively.2. According to the analyses to the causes of errors committed by the subjects, the errors committed by the PSSs in their Chinese writings, we considering the restriction of cognitive psychology development as the main causes. However, the errors committed by the JMSSs in their English writings, considering the restriction of linguistic expression as the main causes, when the requisite English form has not been learnt, it is hard to express what they thought. There are five important reasons to illustrate them.(1) The process of the PSSs'NLA is closely associated with their development of cognitive psychology, their NLA take place in the context of intellectual development. But the process of JMSSs'SLA characterized by interlingual transfer from their native language, in the case of transfer, learners use their previous NL knowledge to organize second language data.(2) The primary school students'NLA is associated with their conceptual representations. Language acquisition builds on antecedently available concepts, hence the PSSs'task is to map novel words in the input onto conceptual representations already in their mind. But in the process of JMSSs'SLA, the system and structure of their NL have established, their SL system and structure are only linguistic system and structure, upon which the learners can draw.(3) The PSSs'NL has the power to shape their development of cognitive psychology. The systematic encoding of certain conceptual distinctions in grammar may encourage the PSSs to use these distinctions consistently in their representational thought. But the JMSSs memorize the English words listed in the textbooks or vocabulary books without considering the contextual use relating to the words, thus resulting in the wrong use or choice of the words.(4) The emergence of errors in the PSSs'writings is caused by the nature of their cognitive prerequisites. In the process of their native language development, most of the difficulty in learning mentalistic and abstract vocabulary comes from mastering the relevant concepts. However, in English writings, the JMSSs'false assumption on the semantic and syntactic equivalence of English and Chinese words is a main reason.(5) The improvement of the PSSs in source monitoring skills is cognitive development. From the writing errors, it can strongly indicate that the PSSs are not able to express certain mentalistic concepts verbally because they cannot fully entertain these conceptions. Their language acquisition proceeds hand in hand with their developing knowledge about sources of information. But the JMSSs'SLA is not unlike their L1 acquisition, it is a subset of general human learning involving cognitive variations; it is closely related to one's personhood; it is intervoven with their second culture learning. Finally, from the pedagogical perspective, the author proposes some implications for researchers, teachers and learners to develop their language.However, this study is only a tentative study on writing errors. There are inevitably some limitations in the designing of research and the analysis, we need to make more efforts in the further study.