Error Analysis Of Tourist-guide English Commentaries: A Case Study At A Vocational School In Changchun

Error Analysis (EA) came into being at the end of 1960s. Without doubt, as a branch of Applied Linguistics, it has made tremendous contributions to the study of second language acquisition. Error Analysis examines the actual errors made by the learners and sees errors as a natural phenomenon occurring inevitably in the process of learning a second language, which helps us find out a better way learners can employ in the learning process. Then what types of errors do the tourist majors often commit? What are the sources of these errors? What pedagogical implications do we get from the analysis of these errors? These questions are the major concern of this thesis and are discussed as follows.Part One is about the reasons for carrying on this research and puts forward the research questions and shows the significance of this study. Part Two traces the origins of Error Analysis in the field of Second Language Acquisition and reviews some influential researches relevant to this study. The theoretical framework is also illustrated in this part, including the introduction of EA theory, procedures of error analysis, the classification of errors and detailed introduction of interlanguage and mother tongue interference. Part Three describes the procedures of this study and makes a classification of these errors. The purpose and subject are introduced first and then errors made by tourism majors in this study are classified into lexical, grammatical, discourse and pragmatic categories. Lexical, grammatical, discourse errors are also further classified into many subcategories. Part Four focuses on the detailed analysis of the errors produced by tourism majors. According to the analysis, the author of the present study tries to explore the possible causes of these errors. Under the influence of mother tongue and the shortage in linguistic knowledge, students are more or less influenced by the mother tongue transfer in the course of expressing, the output is the result of chinese-english way of thinking and selecting. Thererfore, the fluency and accuracy is somewhat affected. Part Five concludes the study and brings forward some pedagogical suggestions on the basis of the analysis of these errors. Meanwhile, limitations of the study and possible improvements for further study are also put forward in this part.This research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. The materials for analysis are collected from 30 English tour-guide commentaries written for a classroom assignment by sophomore tourism majors in a Vocational Institute in Changchun. Thorough discussion and analysis of errors serve to draw conclusion that mother tongue inference has an effect on students'writing proficiency to a certain extent. Based on the research work, some pedagogical implications in foreign language teaching are suggested for tourism English majors. The present study is supposed to contribute to reduce errors in tourism discourses.