College English Writing Teaching

Chinglish refers to the irregular language form created by English language learners in China due to the influence of mother tongue and culture. Chinglish is a kind of interlanguage phenomenon in the process of language acquisition, which is distinguished from Standard English on the levels of pronunciation, grammar and pragmatics.Since China began to carry out reform and opening to the outside world, the ability to have effective and appropriate cross-cultural communication with foreigners has become necessary to Chinese people. There's also no exception to Chinese college students who need the competence for both appropriate and correct use of the English language. Most of the linguistic studies in the past few decades only focused on language structure. But, due to many unfavorable factors such as the lack of authentic teaching materials, college English teaching in China still lays its emphasis on teaching the knowledge of language system (e.g. pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary), paying less attention to language application. What's worse, in the eyes of many Chinese college students, passing CET is their ultimate goal of learning English, so they put their emphasis on memorizing words and grammars regardless of social-cultural meanings and social functions of these language elements.Writing is of great importance either in English teaching or learning. Important as it is, writing is found to have received less attention on the part of Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners than other skills like reading and listening. The present situation of Chinese EFL learners' writing proficiency does not seem to meet the need of current syllabus although much effort has been made to improve their writing proficiency. Major efforts of the thesis go into analyzing the causes of Chinglish on several dimensions. And the paper states the phenomenon of Chinglish, including its resources and characteristics, and further explores its relationship with China English and Standard English based on the theories of Interlanguage Studies, Language Transfer, especially the negative transfer, Error Analysis and Contrastive Analysis. Meanwhile, the samples chosen from the writing assignments were analyzed according to lexical, syntax and discourse levels repectively.In this way, the author found that the most frequently occurring errors were the lexical errors (including wrong choice of words and wrong collocations), idiomatic expressions and wrong patterns at discourse level, which are all relevant to Chinglish. Finally, the analysis and some points are made about these errors. In addition, the correct attitude should be given priority and more error-correction skills should also be taught. What's more, some strategies to improve English teaching especially writing are given in the thesis. The teachers should encourage the students to read extensively and help them develop the habit of thinking in English. At the same time, integrating culture into college English teaching, especially the writing teaching should be given first priority.Finally, though the negative influence and transfer of Chinglish should not be ignored when the writing is taught, the significant role of Chinglish in the English localization will also be pointed out from the perspective of Globalization & Localization. In chief, Chinglish should be treated scientifically and more attention should be taken in the field of language teaching and research so as to exert its positive influence and limit the negative in maximum.