A Study Of Interlingual Errors In Yi Minority High School Students’ English Writings From The Perspective Of Markedness Theory

Jack C.Richards distinguishes interlingual errors and intralingual errors when he analyses error sources.In interlingual errors,learners erroneously apply the features and rules of their first language to their second language,which can produce negative transfer.Upon previous research,language transfer is affected by the markedness features of both the native language and the target language.When the features of the native language are unmarked,or less marked than those of the target langue,negative language transfer occurs.In the process of English learning,the Yi students are to be influenced not only by Chinese but also by their native language,the Yi language.This study is expected to explore where the errors that the Yi students are likely to make lie in their English learning and the causes of these errors as well by way of analyzing the language features of both English and the Yi language.Thus,this study will be conducted based on the following three research questions.1)What are the distribution and the frequency of the grammatical errors in the Yi senior high school students’ English writings?2)What are the error rates and difficulty levels of the grammar items?3)What are the causes of the errors in terms of language markedness features?In this study,the samples are 60 pieces of English compositions by the Yi students form two senior high schools.Based on National English Curriculum Standards for General High Schools(2017),the interlingual errors in the English writing samples are identified,classified,described and explained in terms of 39 grammar items,with the occurrence frequency of the corresponding errors recorded.Meanwhile,when we divide the frequency of its erroneous occurrence of a grammar item by the total frequency of the occurrence of the grammar item,we get the error rate.If high error rate occurs with a grammar item,the item is difficult for students.If the error rate is higher than 0.20,we grade the grammar item difficult.If the error rate is lower than 0.10,we grade the grammar item simple.If the error rate is between 0.10 and 0.20,we grade the grammar item comparatively simple.After that,the language features of both English and the Yi language are analyzed to probe into the influence of language markedness on interlingual errors.The results are found as follows.1)There are 1102 errors in total identified from the 60 pieces of English writings,457 being morphological errors and 645 being syntactic errors.The morphological errors mainly occur on the morphological forms of verbs and nouns,with 188 errors on verbs and 75 errors on nouns.As for the syntactic errors,errors on sentence elements rank the highest,which occur 305 times,and the errors on tenses and sentence types rank the second and the third,with error frequency of 138 and 137 respectively.2)The occurrence frequency of some errors is not directly proportional to their error rates.After analyzing all the errors in terms of 39 grammar items,the students’ use frequency of some grammar items is very low,but the error rate is very high,which indicates that the higher the error rate of the grammar,the more difficult it is for the Yi students.The results of difficulty levels of grammar items show that morphological items that have higher error rates are third person singular form(0.8),reflexive pronouns(0.42),auxiliary verbs(0.38),articles(0.29),indefinite pronouns(0.29),the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives(0.25)and prepositions(0.20),whereas syntactic items with higher error rates include passive voices(1),attributive clauses(0.85),present perfect tense(0.67),negative sentences(0.58),object clauses(0.47),simple future tense(0.44),adverbial clauses(0.41),complements(0.39),exclamatory sentences(0.38),interrogative sentences(0.37),present continuous tense(0.30)and predicatives(0.27).3)In terms of the causes of interlingual errors,it is found,by a contrast analysis on the language features of both English and the Yi language,that interlingual errors are easily produced due to negative transfer under the following circumstances:(1)When the language features are marked in English but unmarked in the Yi language;(2)When the language features are marked similarly in both English and the Yi language,but they are more marked in English than in the Yi language.