An Analysis Of Students' Interlanguage Errors In Vocational And Technical College

Higher vocational education (HVE) is an essential component of our country's higher education system, and vocational and technical colleges (VTCs) are responsible for training advanced workers with professional skills. Up till now, 908 common VTCs have been established independently in the whole country, which account for 58.5 per cent of the total common institutions of higher education. HVE is the advanced stage of vocational education. The purpose of English teaching in VTCs is to developing students' proficiency in English, and the principle of English teaching in VTCS is practical and sufficient for need, therefore the depth and scope of VTC students' linguistic knowledge is different from those of ordinary university students. College students of various levels often commit errors of various types in their writing. In this thesis, the author selects non-English-major sophomores both in VTC and ordinary university as contrasting objects. First the students are required to write a guided composition in class within thirty minutes;then the written errors are collected and classified according to the viewpoints of western and Chinese linguists;and then the author tries to find the sources of these errors. The following conclusions are drawn on the basis of the survey: (1)There exists strong correlativity between students' quality and the number of errors of various types;(2) Compared with ordinary university students, VTC students' IL errors seem more rudimental, which reflects in a steady flow of misspelling and more negative-transfer errors influenced by their mother tongue— Chinese. These two conclusions are exemplified by four chapters in this thesis.In Chapter 1, the author views the research on IL abroad and at home, including the research on the theory of contrastive analysis (CA),interlanguage (IL) and error analysis (EA), and confirms the contribution of EA theory to the research of second language acquisition (SLA).Chapter 2 first explains the concepts of errors and EA, then introduces two different attitudes towards learners' errors—the structuralists' attitude and the post-structuralists' attitude, finally lists four linguists' ways of error classification. And based on the classification above, this chapter sums up the sources of errors.Chapter 3 is an actual investigation and analysis of students' errors in VTCs. Starting with the current situation of English teaching in VTCs, we highlight the significance of analyzing the IL errors in VTCs, and study 77 sophomores' IL errors in Hunan Vocational College of Science and Technology (HVCST) and 77 sophomores' IL errors in XiangNan University (XNU). Through contrastive analysis, we find the characteristics of VTC students' IL errors, then try to analyze the typical errors of some types, and finally probe into four sources of these errors.In view of the results of investigation in Chapter3, we give some enlightenment of EA to English teaching in VTCs in Chapter 4: (1) Setting reasonable goals for VTC students according to their factual level of English;(2) Strengthening the teaching of rudimentary knowledge of English, i.e. realizing the importance of teaching vocabulary and grammar;(3) Combining reading with writing;(4)Teaching students western cultures as well as other knowledge of English;and (5) developing error-correction (EC) techniques. In (5), the author discusses in detail the techniques of error correction involving the types of errors to be corrected and the methods of correcting errors.