Study Of Interlanguage In English Writing Of Non-English College Students

In Selinker’s (1972) view, interlanguage refers to a continuum that is anin-between and inherently variable system between native language and targetlanguage. It is always in its development and is approaching the target language.Language learners are always somewhere along the interlanguage continuum.Foreign language learning is a process in which interlanguage gradually reachestarget language, during which errors are inevitable. Every learner is at somedevelopmental point in interlanguage system and gradually get closer to targetlanguage with the increase of learning amount. However, the errors areunavoidable due to the differences between target language and native language.Many researchers have studied English learners’ interlanguage. In China, Gui Shichun(1988) made the detailed analysis of students’ written interlanguage.Dai Weidong and Shu Dingfang (1994) made a contrastive analysis of students’written interlanguage. Wei Naixing and Gao Xia (2005) analyzed phoneticerrors in COLSEC. Chen Wanxia (2002) made an analysis of collocation errorsin English learners’ compositions. Bi Cuiping (2008) studied writteninterlanguage of English majors.The present research is intended to conduct on the interlanguage in Englishwriting of non-English college students and find out what kind of errors theycommit in their writings based on contrastive analysis theory and error analysistheory. The data comes from the writings of70first-year non-English-majorundergraduates in Shanxi Normal University, their major is EducationalPsychology. The quantitative and qualitative analysis are carried out on theerrors in their writings.Data analysis shows that the students’ errors in compositions occur at thelevel of morphology, vocabulary and syntax. The errors at morphological levelare classified into article, singular and plural forms, comparative degree ofadjectives and adverbs, case. The errors at lexical level are classified into adjectives, preposition and preposition phrases, conjunction, adverbs, pronoun,nouns, verbs and verb phrases, auxiliary and redundancy. The errors at syntacticlevel are classified into subject form, agreement, tense and voice, there-bestructure, attributive clause and inappropriate sentence. Data analysis reveals thedistribution of the interlanguage frequency in the written productions ofnon-English freshmen. Then the possible reasons for interlanguage errors arediscussed, they mainly conclude: language transfer, learning strategy, mode ofthinking and overgeneralization.The present research is very helpful for students to know about thecharacteristics of interlanguage and the errors they tend to commit, thusreducing the probability of making mistakes, and help them to improve teaching.Students should remove the interference of NL, enhance English thinking,strengthen exercises through imitation and recitation and enlarge English inputby reading and create the English environment. And it is beneficial for teachersto arrange teaching schedule properly and improve teaching methods.