Chinese Learners' Spoken English Errors: A Comparative Study Between Middle School Students And College Students

The past decades saw a continuous growing of China's impact on international affairs.Consequently,as an international language,English has gained greater attention in China.Compared with learners in other countries,Chinese learners' competence in practical use of English is rather weak.They are doing particularly poor in speaking,which is often dubbed “mute English”.To deal with those problems,an increasing number of researches have been done on oral English in recent years.Yet so far analyses focusing on oral errors are still quite few.As too many errors in oral English largely hinder effective communication in their life and work,we assume that an investigation into the errors learners produce in oral communication might shed more lights in this regard.This research is an empirical case study of the oral errors committed by Chinese learners from an Error Analysis perspective.The theory of Error Analysis has been one of the most influential theories in Applied Linguistics.Its supporters(Corder,1967;Richards,1978)hold the view that in the course of second language acquisition,errors are inevitable and making errors is an essential step of learning.Errors contain abundant information,by systematically studying of which,teachers can do better in language education while learners themselves can have a better understanding of their own competence.On the basis of Error Analysis theory,this paper tries to compare features of errors in oral English committed by Chinese leaners at different levels of English.The author collects dialogue recordings of middle school students(can be regarded as English beginners)and college students(can be regarded as intermediate learners),transcribes into texts,and makes a quantitative comparative study.According to a blend of James' s(2001)taxonomy and linguistic classification,errors in this research are classified into five types: phonetic errors,lexical errors,grammar errors,discourse errors and pragmatic errors.In total,2126 errors(beginners 1078 and intermediates 1048)are identified and analyzed.The findings are as follows:(1)Beginners and intermediate learners commit much of the same types of errors.Different error types of the two groups rank in the same order of frequency.From the most to the least,they are: grammar errors >lexical errors>phonetic errors >discourse errors>pragmatic errors.(2)For grammar errors,intermediate learners commit errors of this type much less than beginners,indicating that through more time and efforts spent on learning,learners can make a more obvious improvement in grammar competence of oral English than other types.(3)In phonetic errors,beginners commit more addition errors than intermediate learners,mainly concerning on vowel addition.As for phonetic substitution,there is no obvious difference.That suggests once learners form a habit of mispronunciation of one phoneme,it's hard for them to change.(4)In lexical errors,beginners commit more formal errors while intermediates commit more semantic errors,indicating that vocabulary distinction and acquisition takes more time than rules of inflection.(5)There are various reasons behind these errors.In this research,most errors result from inter-lingual transfer and intra-lingual transfer.The former includes phonetic transfer,lexical transfer,grammar transfer and cultural transfer.The latter includes over-generalization and incomplete application of rules.In additional to these two kinds of reasons,a small number of errors are caused by communicative strategies.