A Study Of Chinglish In Non-English Majors’ Compositions

In recent years, there are an increasing number of Chinese students, who arelearning English. However, because of various reasons, they find that the English theyproduce is not always as authentic as the native speakers do, either in spoken orwritten form. This paper will focus on the written form of these learners becauseamong the four basic skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing isregarded as the advanced cognitive activity, which reflects the writer’s comprehensivelinguistic competence. However, it’s not so easy to make a good piece of writing;various errors, especially in the compositions of non-English majors’, may sometimescause misunderstanding, and even become a laughingstock to some degree.This research focuses on analysis of Chinglish in English compositions byChinese college students of non-English majors. It takes error analysis as thetheoretical framework, and adopts both quantitative and qualitative method to conductthe analysis of Chinglish that appeared in the students’ compositions. The subjectswere200non-English majors from three different universities in Shann’xi Province.In May,2011, these students were given six different topics to choose and were askedto finish the compositions according to the directions. After that,200compositionswere collected. Then the errors in the compositions were picked out and categorizedinto interference and non-interference errors. Chinglish is just a kind of interferenceerror and then Chinglish was further classified into three kinds from the perspective oflanguage, thought and culture. The data analysis generated the following findings:First, Chinglish makes up68%proportion of all the whole errors appeared in thecompositions and is a serious problem. Second, Chinglish has many manifestations.Then the possible causes for Chinglish were investigated from different perspectives.Finally, based on discussions on the causes for Chinglish, its countermeasures are alsooffered so that such awkward expressions can be eradicated to the minimal degree.It is hoped that this research can shed some light on the improvement ofnon-English majors’ English writing and the teaching of English writing in the future.