A Study On Pronoun Errors Made By Chinese Secondary School Students In English Writing From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Chinese English learners encounter many difficulties in the process of language development,especially in the field of the word class.Vocabulary learning is the basis of the second language(English)acquisition,and pronouns as one of them,its importance is self-evident.The pronoun error is a common phenomenon in the second language learning,and it is also a difficult problem in the teaching process.It can be seen that the study of the second-language pronoun error is an important aspect in the field of second language acquisition.Conceptual transfer is the latest theoretical achievement of language transfer,which explains the underlying causes of errors made by L2 learners in the process of learning from the cognitive and psychological aspects,so as to explore the essence of mother tongue transfer from the view of human thinking.Through the literature review,it can be found that there are many studies on English pronouns in second language acquisition both at home and abroad,but the researches on the whole pronoun system are less.Besides,there are many studies based on the error analysis theory,but less from the cognitive point of view.This study takes the conceptual transfer theory as the theoretical framework,and uses a sub-corpus,ST2,of the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC)as the research data,aiming to study the phenomenon of pronoun errors made by Chinese secondary school students and answer the following two questions:(1)What are the types of errors that Chinese secondary students made in the acquisition of pronouns? What are the frequencies of such error types?(2)What are the possible causes of these pronoun errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer?The results show that:(1)The pronoun errors made by Chinese secondary school students can be divided into four types,namely pronoun omission,pronoun addition,pronoun ambiguity and pronoun confusion,whose frequencies are 3.5%,2.9%,11.9%,81.7%respectively,where pronoun confusion can be further divided into 8 specific types,namely,confusion within personal pronoun,confusion within possessive pronoun,confusion within wh-pronoun,confusion within demonstrative pronoun,confusion within infinite pronoun,confusion between personal pronoun and possessive pronoun,confusion between personal pronoun and reflexive pronoun and confusion between personal pronoun and relative pronoun.(2)The possible causes of pronoun errors are that the students wrongly mobilize Chinese concepts in the process of English learning,which leads to the negative transfer of the Chinese pronoun concepts.Based on the above analysis,this paper proposes the following teaching suggestions: in the process of English teaching,teachers should help students gradually establish the grammatical concept category of English pronoun system,and increase the application of English native corpus in the foreign language learning,so that the students can understand English pronouns better in specific contexts.It is hoped that the present study can provide some support for the conceptual transfer theory and enrich conceptual transfer theory in lexical acquisition.In addition,it is also hoped that this study can provide some inspiration and references for the further studies on English word class teaching.