An Investigation On The Relevancy Of English Linguistic Thinking And English Language Competence

Linguistic thinking which is a kind of thinking belonging to modern civilization is a reflection of mind. This thesis firstly discusses the relationship between language and mind which has been a topic for a long time in the field of linguistic, psychology, philosophy and cognition. Based on generalizing the generating and developing of linguistic thinking, the author gets such a conclusion: the past researches focused on the relationship between language and mind but neglected the interrelationship between thinking in generating and processing of language their integrating with each other. According to recent researches, many researchers have realized the thought in foreign language, English thinking ability and so on, but there is no systemic discussion on linguistic thinking.The purpose of the thesis is to study English linguistic thinking and to find out the interrelationship between English linguistic thinking and English language competence by investigating Chinese English majors'English linguistic thinking. The thesis is expected to provide some new perspectives on foreign language teaching and learning in China and provide some new information to the present research on linguistic thinking. The innovations of the thesis are: firstly, the concept of linguistic thinking is relatively new; secondly, the correlation between linguistic thinking and English language competence are neglected, so the thesis hopes to provide some ground work to it. Thirdly, the research methodology of the thesis adopts the combination of test and case study. At last, the thesis adds an important element of cultivating linguistic thinking, that is, social cognition.The structure of the thesis is organized as follows:Chapter one is the literature review. The author makes an introduction to the origin and development of linguistic thinking and relative researches. In this chapter, the research questions of the thesis are proposed through present the limitation of previous study on linguistic thinking. Chapter two is theoretical framework. Theories such as Chomsky's Mental Theory, the definition and characteristics of linguistic thinking put forward by Yang Min and her Hypotheses on mental system of language and so on.To investigate Chinese English majors'linguistic thinking and the correlation between linguistic thinking and English language competence, a survey about linguistic thinking in English is made in Chapter 3. The methods adopted in the thesis are test and case study.Chapter 4 is the analysis and discussion of the results of the survey. Analysis shows that the English linguistic thinking does exist. The test itself is designed to measure the subject's English linguistic thinking; the source of the test also ensures that the validity of the test; and test results validate the initial assumptions. Through analysis of data gotten from case studies, conclusion can be derived: the correlation between English linguistic thinking and English language competence is significant.Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the thesis, which including three parts: The first part is some findings derived from the analysis of survey data Since the English linguistic thinking and English language competence correlate with each other, the cultivation of linguistic thinking and some relative problems should be integrated into the English language teaching. So the second part is some suggestions to foreign languages teaching. The third part is about some limitations of the thesis.The thesis hopes to do some basic work and provide some useful information to the study of English linguistic thinking.