On Native Language Interference In Chinese ESL Students' Compositions

In all the aspects of college English learning, writing is the students' weakness. It is well-known that the essential techniques of writing are mainly embodied in the ability of sentence arrangement and discourse organization. Chinese writing is like this, so is English writing. The purpose of writing is to express the author's ideas by composing grammatically correct sentences and organizing complete discourses in ways of combining sentences together. For Chinese college students, learning to write in English is quite different from learning to write in Chinese, for they have commanded their native language and are used to writing in Chinese in the course of learning to write in English. In this case, they inevitably tend to rely on patterns of language and stylistic conventions that they have learned in their native language. Many linguists, such as Habbard (1983), put native language interference on the top when listing various reasons that cause errors in students' writing. The process of Chinese college students' English writing is like that of translation from Chinese into English.By using contrastive analysis and by comparing English and Chinese in various aspects, especially the perspectives of syntactic structures and discourse organizations,...