A Contrast Of Word Order Between English And Chinese And A Confirmatory Experiment On The Application Of Word Order To The Teaching Of High School English Writing

Writing is an arduous task to complete in the teaching of English. Experience tells us that word order is an immense obstacle to students' effective writing. The analysis of the compositions of middle school students shows that in addition to vocabulary and tenses mistakes, syntactic errors and Chinglish such as word disorder, unfocused topic sentences, and inappropriate transition, are quite common in Chinese students' English writing.With the first-hand language material obtained from teaching and under the guidance of the theories of transfer and contrastive analysis, the author makes an analytical contrast of word order between English and Chinese at both the syntactical and discourse levels including the simple sentence, the complex sentence, modifiers and the whole essay. The different thinking patterns of the two nations, as the author of the dissertation suggests, brings about the subject-predicate structure which characterizes English sentences and the topic-comment structure which characterizes Chinese sentences, thus giving rise to the differences in sequencing words between English and Chinese.The expansion mechanisms of the two languages are also widely divergent: regulated by an end weight principle, the English sentence pattern is open ending, while a strong tendency of weight fronting of the Chinese sentence prescribes that its linear word ordering is from right to left. Such an influence finds expression not only in the simple sentence and the complex sentence but also in modifiers. Modifiers in English tend to be post-positioned while most modifiers in Chinese are pre-positioned.In terms of texts, the English text, based on hypotaxis, is organized in a linear style with prominent topic sentences, compact structures and good cohesion and coherence. On the other hand, the Chinese text, based on parataxis, is spirally organized with usually not clearly stated topic sentences, loose link between sentences and fewer conjunctions and cohesive devices.In view of the fact that the difference of word order interferes with high school students' English writing, the author has made attempts to utilize the contrastive method of word order in teaching English writing in order to test the result of this teaching method, and has done some experimental research on the contrastive...