A Study Of French Majors' Writing Based On Theories Of Error Analysis And Interlanguage

Writing is a comprehensive reflection and test of language competence, the difficulty and importance of which for foreign language learners are recognized by the community of foreign language researchers. Error analysis has been considered as one of the important means for researches of writing in second and foreign languages. An error study based on learners'writing is helpful to explore the characteristics of Interlanguage and the rules of language acquisition, to enrich the theory of second language acquisition, and to guide the scientific instruction of language teaching. The achievements of the Chinese-English interlanguage writing errors are rather rich, while the researches of Chinese-French are relatively few. Therefore, this research has carried on a more comprehensive investigation and analysis of writing errors made by French majors, in a framework of theories on error analysis and interlanguage, taking both the qualitative and quantitative methods. It aims to systematically present the categories and distributions of Chinese-French interlanguge writing errors, to explain the causes, and to put forward some teaching proposals and measures based on the results of the study. Hence, this research not only plays a role of supplement and advancement to the theoretical study of current foreign language teaching, but also has a strong practical significance in French major teaching.The data in the thesis originates from the writing assignments related to the research which are designed for the French majors of Grade two and Grade Three in Hebei University by the author, also from the questionnaires and interviews on the investigation subjects. The data analysis indicates that the grammatical errors and the lexical errors account for the largest proportion. Interlingual interference, intralingual interference and inappropriate strategies are the main causes of errors in French writing. Among the causes, interlingual error comes from the negative transfer of Chinese and English, intralingual errors are due to the over-generalization of the target language rules by language learners, and the choice appropriateness of learners'strategy will affect writing quality as well to a certain extent. The thesis consists of five chapters. A brief introduction is offered in chapter 1, together with the source of the issue, the significance and purpose of the study as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 introduces theories of Error Analysis and Interlanguage, and reviews the previous studies on writing errors in Chinese-English and Chinese-French interlanguages. Chapter 3 describes the research design and methodology, including the research questions, the subjects, the research instruments as well as the data collection and the analysis procedures. Chapter 4 presents a detailed analysis and discussion on the collected data. Conclusion is drawn in chapter 5, which summarizes the major findings of this study and points out some implications for French major teaching, limitations of the study and suggestions for future research.