An Analysis Of Mother Tongue Interference At The Lexical And Grammatical Levels In Chinese Learners' English Writings

On the basis of Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Interlanguage theories, the author of the present thesis attempts to analyze mother tongue interference in Chinese learners' English writings at the lexical and grammatical levels. The interference occurs in the form of erroneous or unidiomatic expressions in their English writings in diciton, collocation, sentential organization, etc. and for these mistakes and unnatural expressions the writer tries to put forward some suggestions as workable solutions to mother tongue interference in Chinese learners' writings. The suggestions are briefly described as follows.1. Language input Teachers of English should help Chinese learners into the habit of reading as many English articles as possible. In addition, more other language materials should be offered to them. In the process of reading, learners may well absorb useful expressions and develop a good sense of the target language.2. CA of English and Chinese A systematic comparison of English and Chinese is necessary because it can provide learners with a keen awareness of the general or specific differences between the two languages at different linguistic levels. Comparison of English and Chinese should be done in these aspects, namely, lexical meaning,sentence patterns and way of thinking.3. Translation practice Carefully-designed translation exercises which reflect the major differences between the two languages are helpful to Chinese learners to overcome mother tongue interference.With detailed contrastive studies of English and Chinese in different linguistic aspects and the help of interlanguage theory, it is hoped that the analysis will make Chinese learners of English aware of the discrepancies between English and Chinese at the two levels so as to overcome mother tongue interference and that the suggestions will help them improve their English writing skills.The thesis is structured into six chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the whole thesis, beginning with a general introduction to mother tongue interference, followed by a mention of the two theories to be applied to the present study as well as a brief statement of the aim of the thesis. Chapter 2 is a literature review about the related studies done in this field. Chapters 3 and 4 respectively deal with mother tongue interference at the lexical and grammatical level in Chinese learners' writings, and in each chapter there are descriptions of the major differences between English and Chinese, to be followed by an analysis of the errors and unidiomatic expressions mainly collected from CLEC that are attributed to mother tongue interference. On the basis of theprevious two chapters some workable solutions are provided in Chapter 5 in order to help learners reduce their errors and overcome their difficulties in their process of learning to write in English. Chapter 6 is a summary of the main points covered in the thesis.