An Analytical Study On Mongolian Senior High School Students' Attributive Clause Error

Error analysis,as one of the main branches in applied linguistic,plays a great important role in second language acquisition.It made a significant contribution to developing the status of learners in the process of second language acquisition.Learners' errors are no longer regarded as “defective linguistic forms”.It is inevitable for learners to commit error as learning foreign language.Therefore,error analysis attracts many researchers' attention.The study of learners' error assists not only learners to improve their learning strategies but also English teachers to develop the teaching methods.Due to the difference between English and Mongolian in the attributive clause,it is difficult for Mongolian English learners to study and utilize the attributive clause.The complexity of the English attributive clause itself adds difficulty to Mongolian students learning English.So it is necessary to study the errors on the attributive clauses made by Mongolian learners and find out useful and efficient ways to learn and teach.Based on the theories of error analysis,contrastive analysis,interlanguage and language transfer and situation of Mongolian senior high students' English learning,the current study aims to find out the types and causes of errors on Mongolian senior high student' English relative clause learning.The participants of the study are students from Senior Three grade,Hohhot Mongolian School;their mother tongue is Mongolian,their second language is Chinese,and their third language is English.In addition,the English class carries on with the help of their mother tongue.The research instruments include a test and a background questionnaire.The test consists of language sentence combination task and sentence translation test.There are ten pairs of simple sentences for the test of sentence combination and ten sentences in the sentence translation test.In the light of the actual proficiency level of the participants,the author designed and conducted a test which contains the types of attributive clauses such as SU,DO,IO,OPREP,GEN,OCOMP,When,Where,Why and Non-restrictive among 30 students who are taught English in Mongolian since junior high and Mongolian as the native language.Based on careful analysis on the errors made by the participants,the author worked out that Mongolian senior high students mainly tend to make the following twelve types of errors: avoidance & replacement,misuse of relative words,resumptive pronouns,ellipsis of prepositions,“S+V” pattern replacing the attributive clause,non-adjacency,misuse the restrictive clause,resumptive prepositions,inappropriate ellipsis of relative words,mistakenly taking antecedent and absence of antecedent.Then the author studied the causes of the errors under the guidance of the theories and figured out that the errors mainly result from negative transfer of the mother tongue and improper use of learning strategies and communication strategy.Based on the findings from the test and the questionnaires of teachers and students,at last,the author put forward some reasonable implications for teaching and learning that English Mongolian teachers should apply L1 to improve students' proficiency of target language,strengthen students' sensitivity of English attributive clause,cultivate students' learning strategies and help students build a right attitude toward learning English.