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Mother Tongue Transfer On The English Writing Of Chinese EFL Students

Posted on:2007-03-05Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X Y TaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360185984888Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Mother tongue transfer in the process of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is an important and controversial problem not only for linguists but also for language teachers. Researches at home and abroad have developed a lot in recent years.Researches abroad have focused on the proportions of errors caused by mother tongue transfer in a corpus since 1970s. Whereas Dulay and Burt (1973) report that transfer accounts for only 3 per cent of the errors in their corpus of Spanish-speaking learners' English, Tran-Chi-Chau (1975) reports 51 per cent in adult Chinese-speaking learners' English.At home there have been more and more researches about mother tongue transfer in the 1990s. Guo Chunjie and Liu Fang (1997) have found that the first language (L1) serves as intermediary language in logic (meaning) reasoning processing, in the formal monitoring in target language output, and in mutual retrieval of the world conception and the target language. Wen Qiufang and Guo Chunjie have made further research (1998) and found that the students with higher scores on composition use L1 far less than the students with lower scores. Liu Donghong (2002) has found 21 main types of errors in the picture compositions of Chinese college students, such as errors in subject-predicate agreement, errors in tense, applying Chinese phrases mechanically, confusion of parts of speech, improper words, spelling errors and so on and has pointed out that of them 16 kinds are the result of mother tongue transfer except for the 5 types such as confusion of parts of speech, improper words, spelling errors and so on. Nevertheless, unlike the researches abroad, there are not many such researches as the effect of mother tongue transfer on the English writing of Chinese learners at home, and even fewer researches about the proportions of errors caused by mother tongue transfer in a corpus.This research attempts to investigate the main types of errors made by Chinese EFL students in their English writing, then to explore the sources of the identified...
Keywords/Search Tags:mother tongue transfer, error analysis, interlanguage, interlingual error, intralingual error
PDF Full Text Request
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