Errors Of Mongolian Learners In English Writing

Since the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, the English teaching in China has achieved rapid progress, and most Chinese students'English proficiency has been remarkably improved. However, due to certain factors, the English teaching and learning in minority ethnic areas still lag behind other areas of China. Furthermore, few researches have been conducted on minority ethnic students'English learning.This thesis, by means of Error Analysis, undertakes an empirical study on the errors made by Mongolian learners in their English writing, hoping to find out the rules of these errors and explore the causes of them. Furthermore, when analyzing the errors, the author has paid much attention to the language transfer phenomenon in Mongolian students'English learning. By undertaking such a study, the author aims at providing valuable data for teachers and researchers, and supplying statistical data for textbook drafter's reference when they draft English textbooks for Mongolian learners.The subjects of this study are 50 Mongolian students (38 female and 12 male) form the School of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Beijing Normal University, all of which are English majors, ranging form freshmen to senior students. For each subject, two formal writing assignments and one journal are collected as the language sample to do the Error Analysis. Besides, additional information is collected through questionnaire and interview in order to get a more thorough and accurate understanding of the causes of the errors as well as the English learning process of Mongolian learners.The analysis of errors is carried out on two levels: the micro level and the macro level. First of all, the errors are classified into different linguistic categories of morphology, syntax and semantics. The author has quantified the errors to show the tendencies of distribution and then accounted for why these errors are made. Based on the analysis on this level, the macro-analysis of errors is carried out, i.e. the errors are classified into interlingual errors and intralingual errors. And the interference from both their mother tongue (Mongolian) and their second language (Chinese) to their English learning is examined.The research comes to the following conclusions: there are both interlingual errors and intralingual errors; and the statistic figures show that intralingual errors predominate while interlingual errors are committed less severely. However, although the number of interlingual errors is not quite amazing, the author still finds transfer form both L1 (Mongolian) and L2 (Chinese) to English.Besides that, the author has also evaluated the errors and summarized the features of the errors with an aim to put forward some suggestions concerning the attitudes toward these errors.In summary, this thesis has summarized and classified the errors made by Mongolian learners in their English writing, done some primary analysis and discussion of their causes, and examined language transfer in foreign language learning, hoping to offer some useful suggestions for further study on this issue and be beneficial to the English of Mongolian learners, which helps improve the English proficiency of Mongolian learners and then promote the development of the Mongolian nation.