An Analysis Of Causes Of Interlanguage In The Writing By Freshmen Majoring In English

This paper attempts to analyse causes of interlanguage in English writing by freshmen majoring in English by qualitative and quantitative studies. It discusses the main errors and causes of interlanguage through data statistics. Since 1972, 'interlanguage' was coined by Selinker, interlanguage research has become famous in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the last fourty years. Interlanguage has widely existed in English learning of Chinese learners and it is an obstacle for Chinese learners to improve their English. Therefore, this paper intends to analyse the causes of interlanguage.This paper reviews interlanguage research at home and aboard, English writing theories, related interlanguage theory, language transfer as well we error analysis theory. The author discusses causes of interlanguage from morphology, vocabulary, syntax, rhetoric, as well as puctuation, through intensive study on students' composing as well as the questionnaire statistics. After the detectation and analysis, it shows that most errors appearing in students' composing are related to native language transfer. Therefore, the author makes a hypothesis:native language transfer is the main causes of interlanguage in English writing by freshmen majoring in English.This research is based on English writing of freshmen majoring by English coming from Hebei University of Engineering. The author collects the samples, identifies the errors, describes and categorizes errors as well as explain the errors. What's more, the author assorts the causes of errors and calculates the proportions of each type, which help to find out the main causes of interlanguage in English writing of freshmen majoring in English.This paper probes into causes of interlanguage, which provides an empirical study for interlanguage study area. It is very helpful for students to know about the characteristics of interlanguage and to improve English writing and it is beneficial for teachers to arrange teaching schedule properly and to improve teaching.