Empirical Studies On Interlanguage And The Implication For College English Writing

Interlanguage is an important issue in the field of Second Language Acquisition for the past twenty years. It is a kind of transitional language set up by language learners between the mother tongue and the target language. Contrastive analysis and error analysis are the two major approaches used in the research of language learner's interlanguage. In the 1950s and 1960s,Contrastive Analysis (CA), which was based on behaviorism and structural linguistics theoretically, was widely employed to analyze learners' errors. The behaviorists believed that errors produced by the learners would occur at those points at which the two languages were dissimilar. With contrastive analysis, it is possible to predict the errors so as to make certain the key points of teaching. However, Based on the theory of cognitive psychology, error analysis came into being in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the actual errors produced by the learners in the TL. It sees errors as a natural phenomenon that inevitably occurs when learning a first or second language before correct knowledge is acquired and completely internalized. Through the analysis and research of learner interlanguage errors, it is possible to discover the rules of the internal language system.Language teachers are inevitably confronted with various errors made by learners in the course of teaching. Among them, writing error is a major sort. Starting from the pragmatics of interlanguage, this thesis intends to express the implication for foreign language teaching by analyzing the errors appeared in the output of language learners. That is teachers should adopt effective methods to correct the errors and make use of the feedback to adjust teaching method and content according to the weakness and difficulties of the learners. It is also advisable for them to adopt remedial approach to reinforce their teaching.This thesis, with Error Analysis (EA), Contrastive Analysis (CA) as the theoretical basis, analyzes 75 pieces of compositions written by postgraduates in accordance with requirement of the New Teaching Outline. The samples are selected by way of random sampling and a classification of the errors is made first, followed by a discussion of the factors leading to the errors, which are mainly interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer.We can draw the conclusion according to the research that it is better for the teacher to adopt controlled writing method in the practical teaching of writing. Under directive...