Effects Of Different Thinking Patterns Between Chinese And Western On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is a kind of written form of communication, which uses language to express thought and it reflects the unique thinking pattern of culture. Chinese senior high school students also apply English to express their own thought when writing English compositions. However, Chinese and western have their different language culture and thinking patterns. Chinese students are deeply influenced by their mother tongue thinking and find it hard to get rid of it when writing English compositions, so a large number of “chinglish” expressions appear in their English compositions. In recent years there are many researches about mother tongue’s negative transfer and writing in abroad and home, but a few are about the effects of different thinking patterns on students’ English writing. Based on the analysis, this paper attempts to analyze effects of different thinking patterns between Chinese and western in English writing of senior high school students, and manages to find an appropriate way to promote students’ English thinking as well as their English writing ability.This paper firstly states four kinds of different thinking patterns between Chinese and western with explaining the causes of these different thinking patterns. Then the author collected English compositions from two classes in QingZhen No.1 high school and continued to compare and analyze the errors in their compositions from the perspective of the differences between Chinese and western thinking patterns. The analysis mainly aims at the errors that often appear in Chinese senior high school students’ English compositions, for instance, word choice is not appropriate, syntactic and discourse is not reasonable, etc. Generally speaking, this paper carried out the research and analysis in three aspects. Firstly, for the diction part, the author found that many lexical errors caused by different thinking patterns between Chinese and western can be categorized into three kinds, that is, wrong word meaning, word absence, wrong usage in the word speech. Secondly, syntactical errors can be also found in the students’ English compositions. Because of the effects of mother tongue thinking pattern, there are three kinds of typical syntactical mistakes in students’ English compositions. They are about punctuation marks, chinglish expressions and sentence constituent. Finally, for the part of discourse analysis, special attention is paid to the misunderstanding of English topic sentences and the unreasonable of text construction. After concluding and analyzing the errors which often appear in students’ English compositions above, this paper provides some implications and suggestions for the learning and teaching of English teaching.According to this research, we can conclude that there are plenty of errors in students’ English compositions in diction, syntax and discourse, which are mainly due to the dominant role of Chinese thinking in English. So the author suggests that the teaching of the students’ writing ability in English can not only be confined to the training of grammar items and vocabularies. The methods of training students’ writing ability should also be combined with teaching western culture and western thinking patterns so that students are going to know more about the differences of thinking patterns between Chinese and western. This is beneficial to help students gain the reasons why they make mistakes in diction, syntax and discourse and enhance their writing ability in English effectively. Finally, we stress that idiomatic English compositions can be written only if culture is in perfect harmony and unity with language.