The Influence Of Mother Tongue On Net Communication In English By Chinese College Students

This thesis surveys the influence of the mother tongue on net communication in English by Chinese college students. It aims to explore the influence of Chinese on English online chatting by Chinese college students and to help them express their ideas more clearly, efficiently and accurately.The data of this study were collected from chat rooms of Tencent. The researcher spent one month in downloading 921 pages of English chat records by English majors and non-English majors respectively from chat rooms of English corner of CET-4 and chat rooms of English corner of TEM-8. A rigorous analysis of the data resulted in 48 pages of wrong English expressions from chat rooms of CET-4, and 49 pages of incorrect English expressions from chat rooms of TEM-8. The researcher summed up the main problems caused by the influence of the mother tongue, and investigated the different aspects of spelling, grammar and pragmatics.In the matter of spelling, the thesis focuses on the capitalization in net communication in English to investigate the influence of the mother tongue. As for grammar, it analyzes the mistakes in such aspects as the use of articles, the agreement of subject and predicate, singular and plural forms and colligation. With regard to pragmatics, the thesis mainly analyzes the inappropriate responses to compliments. The findings of the study show that the negative influence of the mother tongue on net communication in English by Chinese college students is apparent and salient. Non-English majors are more influenced by mother tongue than English majors. It is observed that the reasons for those mistakes are students'deficiency of English and the characteristics of the Internet, and the most important reason is the mother tongue influence. The study attempts to help English majors and non-English majors improve their English and meanwhile to offer a new perspective of the mother tongue influence.