Exploring Interlanguage Of Chinese EFL

In China, English is learned as a foreign language. The study of Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage constitutes a focus in the field of second language acquisition. Error analysis, despite its weakness and limitation, is being practiced as a methodology to the study of interlanguage since its rise in the early 1970s. The sources of errors remain controversial both home and abroad. This thesis, based on the assumption that the errors are systematic and can thus indicate the development of interlanguage, attempts to explore Chinese students' interlanguage through a case study of errors detected from second-year non-English major students' composition in SWPI (South West Petroleum Institute).Following Corder's procedure of EA, the present study employed qualitative and quantitative methods in data analyzing. Errors are described from different perspectives and the explanation of them is given afterwards. The following findings are revealed from the statistical distributional regularities of these errors:1 Mother language (Chinese) interference, not target language (English) interference, affects L2 learners' IL mainly in their English compositions.2 Besides the influence from native language, target language also plays an important role in shaping students' interlanguage.3 Fossilizations are apparent in students' interlanguage, which indicates that the learners need further internalization of their target language features.4 Students in this study are at the transitional stage, or in Corder's term "systematic stage" in the continuum of their IL developmentBased on the findings pedagogic implications are put forward. 1. Teacher should hold proper attitudes toward errors committed by students in forming their interlanguage; 2. teachers should strengthen students' basic linguistic knowledge and competence reflected through errors they made. To increase students' awareness of linguistic distinction may be beneficial in reducing the negative influence from native language; 3. to create a true language learning context may help to decelerate the rate of IL fossilization.