A Research On Syntactic Errors In Chinese High School Students' English Writings Based On Conceptual Transfer Theory

Conceptual transfer theory is a new perspective in the field of language transfer.The theory is different from the previous theory of language transfer,which tries to re-examine the language transfer phenomenon in second language acquisition from the interface of language and cognition.To learn the second language,we should not only learn the specific structure of the language,but also learn the conceptual structure closely related to these formal structures.When learners study a new language,the conceptual transfer phenomenon occurs due to the difference between the conceptual system of the mother tongue and the second language conceptual system,which affects the output of the learner's second language.As second language learners,they are also influenced by the conceptual transfer when learning English,which is determined by the two different language conceptual systems.The thesis attempts to analyze the syntactic errors of Chinese high school students' English writing by means of concept transfer theory.And the research tries to answer two questions:(1)What kind of syntactic errors students commit in their English writings? What is the distribution of different syntactic errors?(2)What are the underlying reasons of the syntactic errors in English writings from the perspective of conceptual transfer?In this thesis,300 compositions collected from 300 high school students are analyzed and corrected by the author,at the same time,the author adopts method of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to study the types and causes of student's writing.Quantitative analysis is mainly used to describe the types and frequency of syntactic errors,and qualitative analysis is employed to analyze the cause of the syntactic errors.Data analysis and discussion indicate the following findings:(1)High school students mainly make eight kinds of syntactic errors in English writings: subject-predicate disagreement,lack of subject,predicate and object,run-on sentence,misuse of “there-be structure”,errors in number and word order,among which subject-predicate disagreement is at the highest frequency.(2)Students' errors in English writings seem to be due to insufficient language proficiency and writing skills.In fact,the root causes are influenced by two different linguistic thinking patterns and conceptual categories.In a word,the cause of the syntacticerrors from the high school students English writings is due to misuse L1-based concept in the process of second language output,resulting in constructing the L2-based conceptual system.