A Study Of Non-English Majors' Problems On Word Order Of English Multi-premodifiers

Belonging to the Indo-European language family and the Sino-Tibetan language family respectively, English and Chinese are much different in various aspects: sound system, writing system (phonographic vs. ideographic), grammar system, syntax, pragmatics, and so on. It is no exception that there are great differences in terms of word order.In foreign language teaching, English multi-premodifier is a difficult language point, especially for Chinese students, who are quite often influenced by the word order of Chinese language. Thus, they are inclined to write sentences with grammatically incorrect and logically wrong word order. The study on English multi-premodifiers not only has a significant meaning in the study field of linguistics, it is also pedagogically important in instructing language learners learning English multi-premodifiers more effectively. Therefore, lots of earlier literatures have made a comparative research on word order of English multi-premodifier in noun phrases in order to find out some rules in it.However, there is one thing in common for most of the previous literature, that is, most studies only focuses on the study of finding out some word order rules for English and Chinese multi-premodifiers. As regard to how to discover and summarize the specific causes for these errors by using these rules in order to help language teaching, there are few researches on it.The main instrument used in this study is test. Two tests have been designed for this research. And 180 sophomores of non-English majors in Huazhong University of Science and Technology have been chosen for this test. Through the analysis on the result of the testing, the purpose of this paper is to find out the students'specific problems in learning English multi-premodifiers as well as find out the causes for these errors made by students on the basis of previous study.The result shows that students have a great many problems in learning English multi-premodifiers. They have committed the most errors in restrictive zone and descriptive zone. It also finds out four categories of causes for these errors and all these types of causes are exemplified in details. This research has established some academic bases for further proposing of practical teaching methods in this field. We hope it could help in a certain way in teaching multi-premodifiers—a difficult language point for most non-English majors in the university.