Interlanguage Theory And Middle School English Teaching

The interlanguage(IL) theory, which was first mentioned by Selinker in 1969 and was academically formulated in 1972, deals with the nature of L2 learners' language systems. Interlanguage is the language that interposes between native language and target language, and people often make researches on it with the help of contrastive analysis and error analysis. The fruit of these researches do benefit our foreign language/ even the mother tongue teaching and learning. Zhu Pingmei(1990) is one of the forerunners in this field in China.This paper carries out a quantificational analysis upon the corpora of the English learners from primary schools to universities, especially middle schools, and makes comparisons in longitude and latitude. We find out from the comparisons that the language items puzzling the students most are: omission/addition of "~s" after third person singular verbs, omission/addition of "be", error of tenses, error of articles, error of preposition collocations, agreement of subjects and verbs, error of singular/plural nouns, error of infinitives, error of part of speeches, error of possessive cases, empty of conjunctions in coordinative sentences, error of spellings; elementary or intermediate learners(such as freshmen) suffer from native language transfer or simplification a lot; advanced learners(such as sophomores) are affected by the overgeneralization of target language; the error of part of speech or semantic selection(except conceptual meaning) runs through all phases, and it is likely to be fossilized.The resolutions to these problems are improvement of textbook compiling, renovation of teaching conceptions, improvement of teaching abilities and construction of "macro-system of English teaching".We hope this thesis will be of some help to the upcoming researchers, and it will do little to bestead English teaching and textbook compiling.