Analysis Of Syntactic Transfer Errors In Chinese Learners' English Writing

A lot of research reveals that anyone who wants to offer sufficient interpretation of second language acquisition or foreign language learning, has to take the critical factor—language transfer into consideration (Gass & Selinker,1992). It is also the case with EFL learners of Chinese. The study of language transfer brings great, realistic significance to foreign language teaching in China.The current study intends to investigate the influence of mother tongue transfer on the syntactic errors of Chinese students in their English writing. Specifically, the thesis aims at answering the following questions:1 What kind of syntactic transfer errors do Chinese EFL learners make in their writing?a. What are the most common and least common syntactic errors?b. What proportion of the total errors comes from L1 transfer as opposed to intralingual errors in Chinese context?c. What are some possible factors that might have influenced the transfer errors?2 What is the relationship between syntactic errors and students' holistic scores?The method used in the research was a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, in which empirical study was dominant and descriptive study served as an important supplement. Two approaches were adopted in the research: writing sample collection and interview.The author collected 160 different writing samples from 80 students among which 40 were from Shandong University and 40 from Qufu Normal University. They were told to write two compositions in 60 minutes with given topics and word number. Three other college teachers (including one native English speaker...