The Analysis Of Syntactical Errors Of Chinese Intermediate EFL Learners

Language teachers are inevitably confronted with various production errors made by students in the course of teaching. Among them, writing error is a major sort. With the development of linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology and other relevant subjects, people's attitude toward error changed greatly. In the 1950s and 1960s, Contrastive Analysis (CA), which was based on behaviorism and structural linguistics theoretically, was widely employed to analyze learners' errors.At beginning , error analysis is connected with foreign language teaching, which is considered as a branch of Applied Linguistics and is always observed by the researchers. For the intermediate English learners, their Syntactic errors often appear in composition writing, which even influences the whole effect of discourse . So for the intermediate language learners , the syntactic error problem is the first matter to deal with. This thesis takes the EA, CA and transfer as theoretical basis, and analyzes the student's compositions.This thesis takes the intermediate EFL learners as the subjects and reviews the related studies of contrastive analysis, error analysis and transfer theory and analyzes the students'compositions. In the course of analysis, the author utilizes the method of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to categorize the data and discusses the distribution and sources of the syntactic errors. On the basis of the former researchers, the author categorizes the sources of errors into interlingual errors, intralingual errors, and ineffectiveness of teaching and lack of culture knowledge. In the aspect of interlingual errors, mother tongue transfer is discussed; in the aspect of intralingual errors, overgeneralization is discussed. The ineffectiveness of teaching is shown in the inappropriateness of the teaching method.This thesis consists of six parts.Part one reviews the related studies of contrastive analysis, error analysis and transfer theory. In Part two a analysis is given on the intermediate EFL learners'composition (168) and the result is that syntactic error is the main problem for this stage of students. Part three describes the distribution of syntactic errors. In Part four the author analyzes the sources of syntactic errors. Part five discusses the complication of syntactic error analysis. In the conclusion part, the author suggests that English teachers should adopt a cautious attitude towards learners' writing errors and hopes that our discussion will be helpful for the language teachers to solve the head-aching writing problems.