A Study Of The Relationship Between Mother Tongue's Proficiency And English Achievements Of Chinese College Students

With the implementation of the opening door policy, more and more people in China are learning English for various purposes. In recent years there has been an increasingly urgent need of talents who have a good command of English. However, the foreign language teaching and learning in China is not efficient and not to our satisfaction.It is found out that many factors influence foreign language learning such as teaching methodology, teaching materials, learning environments etc. The use of mother tongue has always been a key issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language teaching for at least one century. Teachers and researchers who work on ELT are aware of the difference of the opinion over the question of what the use of mother tongue is in the process of foreign language learning. That is to say, researchers still have disputes over the role of native language. At present, many people pay a little attention to the use of mother tongue in foreign language teaching and learning. In many people's eye, it seems that the native tongue plays a little role when learning a foreign language. The studies in the past show there have been considerable advances made on mother tongue's role in foreign language learning and teaching. It has received more and more attention from researchers and teachers in this field. Fortunately, many linguists come to argue that it is not right to ignore the role of mother tongue in foreign language learning.On the basis of psychology, second language acquisition and language learning theories, the author carried out the research in order to explore the relationship between native language and foreign language learning. The thesis starts with a brief review of relevant theoretical researches on language learning in the past decades. All these serve as a foundation for the research framework.Then the thesis goes on to study the role of mother tongue based on the small-scale investigation among the college students in ZETVC. Thedata in the investigation comprises the subjects' responses to the questionnaires and their English and Chinese achievements. Excel and SPSS (13.5) software are used in the research for quantitative analyses of the data. From the investigation and result analysis, we can reach the following conclusions: most of college students in China have an instrumental motivation when learning English;the degree of motivation and language achievements are in direct proportion;the learners' English achievements are positively correlated with their Chinese achievements.Finally, in the light of the special characteristics of English learning and teaching, the thesis works out some pedagogical implications for EFL teaching and learning in China. The study still contains certain limitations and the paper suggests some possible further study.