| An analysis of the word use by the Chinese learners of English is of crucial significance to both English learning and teaching, and particularly to our current classroom teaching practice nowadays. The analysis of the concordanced data suggests that the major sources of the college learners?errors in word use are located in four aspects. First, the unsuccessful transfer of mother tongue cause errors in word ordering and word choice. The learners tend to apply Chinese syntactic rules and translational word equivalents in their English writing. The failure in transfer is often attributed to the false assumption that there is full corresponding equivalents in Chinese for English in word use. And the way the words and expressions treated in the textbooks in which there are always word for word translation present serves to make the false assumption reinforced in the learners?mental lexicon. Second, the learners tend to overgeneralize the rules they learn in the classroom or from the textbooks. On the one hand, the learners try to apply a common rule to particularity in word use. The errors found in misuse of parts of speech and word ordering reflect such tendency to some extent. On the other, the learners tend to apply the rule of particular language item to generality. The misplacement of auxiliary verbs in the inverted sentence can be regarded as the consequence of applying?rules of verb positions in declarative sentences to inverted sentences. Third, the errors are also caused by transfer of language exposure and transfer of training. The learners seem to have a heavy reliance on the use of particularAn Analysis of the Misused Words by60College English Learners and Its Implications to Writing Teachingform of words (part of speech) while ignoring the other forms. Fourth, the learners?choice of words is also determined by the fact that they are being strategic in choosing words. The learners use words or phrases they feel most confident or safest when they are not sure of the other alternatives available. Sometimes, one word form is overused in the place of words that should be used. This may be due to the inadequate target language resources available to the learners. The implications of the analysis support the statement that the role of the teachers is to facilitate the learners with the target language in real communicative use. And the learners should be exposed to authentic use of language rather than formal knowledge of grammar. Moreover, the teachers can only design an appropriate teaching plan when they are fully awpre of the typical problems encountering the learners. The research also suggests that the analysis on the basis of the concordance from the learner corpus can provide invaluable information concerning where the learners are likely to have difficulties. The concordance based analysis also shows that the concordance tools, together with the learner corpus and native corpora, are powerful tools for English teaching. The concordanced information can be of great significance to real time classroom teaching when made at the teachers?disposal. The application of the corpora and concordance in the development courseware is a successful demonstration of the data-driven learning and teaching. And it is only a beginning of a new enterprise.In accordance with the interlanguage theory, the learner errors themselves are not necessarily bad. They are simply the indicators of the stages of language development at which the learners are located. They are genuine reflection of the learners?present linguistic competence. It is up to the teachers to be facilitative, by providing appropriate target language exposure and remedial teaching, to help the learners formulate more accurate hypotheses and make better moderations in the actual language use. Perhaps the most important thing may not be the argument as for what attitudes we should take towards the learners?errors, but in what way we can tackle such problems with remedial teaching. And the starting point for any attempt in the...
|
PDF Full Text Request