The Influence Of The Chinese Thought Pattern And The English Thought Pattern On The Syntax Organization In Senior High Students’ English Writing

The relationship between language and thinking has been a hot issue among the linguists,philosophers and other scholars. Thinking cannot exist without language, and in most cases iteven dominates the use of language. In contrast, if there is no thinking, language will lose itsfunctions and cannot be expressed clearly and completely. Therefore, there is no denying thatlanguage and thinking are complementary and restrained to each other. Besides an activity oflanguage, writing, including its sentence-making and text layout, is influenced by the thoughtpattern. The thought pattern of the Chinese is parataxis, simple and personal; while that of theWesterners is hypotactic, complex and impersonal.Writing in English is not only a language activity, but also a process of thinking. In theEnglish writing of Senior High students, the leading problem is “Chinglish syntax”. Therefore,the effects which the discrepancies of the Chinese and westerners thought patterns have on thesenior middle school English writing can’t be neglected.Based on the Contrastive Analysis, this thesis mainly explores why and how to improvethe Senior High students’ writing ability by comparing the differences of thought patternsbetween the Chinese and the Westerners.The author first asks the students to write three different styles of composition in arequired time. Then the author examines the syntactical errors in the students’ compositionsfrom the point of two different thought patterns. Owing to the negative effect of the Chineseand the Western thought patterns, errors arise from the hypotactic as well as the impersonal,such as sentence fragments, run-on sentences, word order, active and passive voices and soon.These Chinglish sentences hinder the students from expressing themselves in Englishwriting correctly. It is also found that the lack of contrastive awareness is the main factorleading to the “Chinglish syntax”.To improve the students’ writing ability, the author conducted an experiment in twoclasses for a term. During the experiment, the syntactical exercises are combined with thegrammar teaching---the attributive clauses and the passive voice. First of all, the teacherguides the students to summarize the similarities and differences between Chinese andEnglish. And then they are applied in the Ss’ English compositions, esp. their syntacticalstructures will be compared before and after the experiment.In conclusion, by analyzing the discrepancies of TPs between Chinese and Westerners, we have a deep understanding of syntactical structure in Senior High students’ English writinginstead of the analysis only from the angle of language itself. It is hoped that the thesis canoffer some useful assistance and guidance for future teaching and study in Senior high school.