A Cognitive Analysis Of Syntactic Errors In Chinese College Students’ English Compositions

In recent years, study on students’ writing errors has attracted much attention of the education researchers. However, existing literature shows that researches on students’ writing errors focus most on vocabulary, fewer on syntactic errors. Most researches set students in a certain group as the research subject, fewer on the distribution tendency of main syntactic errors made by college students in different groups. And researches analyze factors mainly based on Error Analysis, Cohesion Theory, Conceptual Transfer Theory and so on, fewer from cognitive perspective.Against such a research background, the present study is designed to conduct a research on syntactic errors appeared in English writings by college English learners in different groups. On the basis of related theories in cognitive linguistics, this study tries to analyze the reasons of the main syntactic errors in compositions among both non-English and English major students, so as to help teachers put cognitive theories into writing teaching, and reduce the syntactic errors in college students’English writings to improve their writing proficiency. This study aims to address the following three research questions:1. What is the distribution of syntactic errors in Chinese college students’ English writings? And what are the linguistic features emerged in the most problematic ones?2. What are the differences of the distribution of syntactic errors in English writings among college students in different groups? And what is the distribution tendency of the main errors?3. What are the possible factors that lead to the main syntactic errors in college students’ English writings from the perspective of cognition?Based on three sub-corpora (ST3, ST4and ST6), the present study selected567pieces of compositions, and give a frequency and type analysis of the syntactic errors made by non-English majors and English majors in higher grades in line with the error classification and tagging method adopted by CLEC. In addition, by means of Image Schema Theory and Prototype Theory as the theoretical frame, the study tries to explain the possible causes of the main syntactic errors with relative cognitive theories. The main findings of the study are as follows:First, errors of the nine categories are not of equal importance in Chinese college students’ compositions. The frequencies of run-on syntactic errors, sentence fragment errors, structural deficiency errors and punctuation errors are relatively much higher, whereas the other five syntactic errors occupy a very small proportion. Among them, structural deficiency errors have the highest proportion accounting for39.90%, and the percentage of run-on syntactic errors (25.43%) ranks the second. The two ones have become the problematic syntactic errors in college students’writing progress, the proportion of both has been more than25%compared with the total percentage. Among the main syntactic errors, the linguistic features of run-on syntactic errors can be classified into three aspects:most clauses sharing the same subject or different subjects; improper ways of using introductory phrases or conjunctive adverbs; one subordinating clause attaching more than one main clause. And for structural deficiency errors, they contain omission, pattern shifting, improper configuration and so on.Second, there exist a negative correlation between college students’proficiency levels and the frequency of syntactic errors. The higher the English level is, the less the errors will be made. The number of the errors made by non-English majors in lower grades is the highest, but quite close to that by non-English majors in higher grades. English majors in higher grades make errors much lower than non-English majors. Although there is inconsistent distribution of each error in students in different groups, the frequencies of run-on syntactic errors and structural deficiency errors are the highest from the whole. From the distribution tendency of the two errors, non-English majors make much more errors than English majors. The percentage of run-on syntactic errors presents a continuous declining trend, with the improvement of college students’ English proficiency level; while structural deficiency errors the opposite. For non-English majors in lower grades, the percentages of run-on syntactic errors and structural deficiency errors are the highest and relatively close with each other. While for non-English majors in higher grades, the percentages of run-on syntactic errors and structural deficiency errors are the highest, but the latter one is much higher than the former one. For English majors in higher grades, the percentage of structural deficiency errors is more than50%, whereas run-on syntactic errors only5.05%.Third, from the cognitive angle, the present study sums up the causes of two syntactic errors from four aspects:the cognitive interference of L1transfer; the cognitive influence of different kinds of language systems between Chinese and English; the cognitive distinction of different thought patterns between Chinese and English; and the adverse cognitive psychological factors. College students tend to map some factors of their mother tongue, such as cultural background, life experience, speech pattern, syntactic structure and so on, into English writings, without attaching attention to the great divergence between Chinese and English. At the same time, according to their cognitive styles, students are used to over-generalizing the summarized syntactic rules when learning L1and put them into English writing, without considering the cognitive difference between Chinese and English thought patterns, so as to contribute to typical syntactic errors with Chinglish syntactic structures or thinking features. Moreover, due to the limited examination time, some psychological factors, such as nervousness, anxiousness, carelessness and so on, should not be neglected.The pedagogical implications in the study are offered as follows:(1) Teachers should make more contrastive analyses between Chinese and English, the two languages, and make a summary of the prototype structure of the two languages. Based on living examples, teachers should analyze the linguistic phenomena only existing in L1learning, so as to help the students find out the reasons for negative transfer resulting in the main syntactic errors during the writing process and make full use of the acceleration exerted by positive transfer of the mother tongue.(2) Teachers should place more emphasis on the syntactic defect, and guide college students to read a lot of English materials, so as to consciously get a command of authentic English expressions and then be familiar with the microscopic differences among English and Chinese syntactic structures or rules. By doing so, students can develop a complete cognitive system of English syntactic structure and reduce the occurrence of the confusion between Chinese and English syntactic structures.(3) Teachers should help college students understand the whole differences between English and Chinese thought patterns, ask students to commonly use English thought pattern in writing process, and foster their English logical thinking consciousness initiatively.(4) Teachers should give college students timely and regular writing exercises by imitating the exam setting and help them be familiar with the types and structures of exam compositions, so as to alleviate their tension and lessen their anxiety when writing.