Exploring Second Language Acquisition: A Study Of Interlanguage Forms In Chinese College EFL Learners' Writing

Interlanguage (IL) is a concept of discussion with a history of over 20' years in second language acquisition research. Making up for the weakness of contrastive analysis, it regards language learner as the research center, reveals the general regularity of language learning and enriches the theory of second and foreign language learning. IL is a dynamic developmental process of L2 learning. According to Nemser (1971) and Tarone (1983), most L2 learners will always be somewhere along the interlanguage continuum in which L2 learners' errors are inevitable both in oral and written IL production.To err is human. Errors are in every native's productions, let alone the foreign language learners. In China, English should be regarded as a foreign language, but not a second language. The long language distance between Chinese and English will inevitably bring about a large variety of errors in the process of IL development of Chinese EFL learners. So the study of errors in Chinese EFL learners' writing will contribute to the study of their interlanguage development that gives the pedagogical implications to foreign language teaching in China.The current study intends to investigate the distribution features and sources of IL errors committed by three different types of Chinese EFL college learners as well as their separate IL development stages by means of English practical writing of an application letter. Specifically, the thesis aims at answering the following questions: (1) What are the main distribution features of the IL errors reflected in the compositions of each type of Chinese EFL learners, convergence or divergence? (2) What are the dominant causes of the IL errors committed by different types of Chinese EFL learners? (3) Which interlanguage developmental stages are the three types of Chinese EFL learners in respectively?All the data come from compositions of 158 non-English majors who are from three different universities in Shaanxi Province: Shaanxi Normal University, Chang'an University and Xi'an Petroleum University. Finally, the author chose 90 sample compositions with 30 taken from each of the three groups: the "basic" group formed bythe freshmen from XAPU, the "intermediate" group composed of the juniors from CAU and the "advanced" group made up of the postgraduates from SXNU. By the use of qualitative and quantitative studies, the author scrutinized and analyzed IL errors from three dimensions條inguistic category, error source and IL developmental stages. And the materials and instruments adopted in the research are students' compositions, the questionnaire and the interview. Based on the analysis and discussion, the findings were summarized as follows:1. IL errors distribution features correlate with the learners' English competence.The higher the EFL learners level is, the more convergent their IL errors distributions is, giving prominence to the errors in verbs, articles, prepositions, tense and collocations; and the lower the EFL learner's level is, the more divergent their IL errors distribution is, with heterogeneous errors almost well-distributed in the linguistic units.2. The general tendency is that native language interference, not target language interference, affects the Chinese EFL learners' IL development most. But specifically, while interlingual errors, or native language interference, affect more in the "basic" and "intermediate' learners' IL development in their written English production, intralingual errors, target language interference, weigh most in the "advanced" learners' IL development in their English compositions.3. It turns out that errors in lexis and syntax constitute the major problem to most learners at each level of English learners in the study, but these errors tend to decrease gradually when the learners reach a more advanced level.4. Based on the IL errors distribution and the language features the different learners showed in their compositions, it is found that the three different Chinese college EFL learners' interlanguage are in a developmental...