Mother Tongue Interference: A Case Study Of Relative Clauses In English Compositions By First-Year Chinese College Students

Transfer is originally a psychological term.And now it is among one of the most popular topics being discussed in the field of Interlanguage pragmatics.By transfer it is meant"the influence resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously(and perhaps imperfectly) acquired".Transfer falls into two categories:positive transfer and negative transfer.Positive transfer,as its name suggests,plays a positive role of facilitating the process of second language acquisition. Negative transfer plays a negative role of hindering the process of second language acquisition.The latter can be referred to as interference.Learning a language should master listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating abilities.Of these five essential abilities,writing is an important part.Writing is a very complicated task even performed in one's mother tongue and a considerably more difficult enterprise when it is carried out in a foreign language.It is universally acknowledged that English and Chinese are two different language systems and belong to Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families respectively. Mother tongue interference occurs especially when there are differences between native language and the target language.In other words,differences between the two languages create learning difficulties which frequently result in errors.Based on Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage theories,the author aims to make an analysis of mother tongue interference through a case study of Relative Clause in English compositions by first-year Chinese college students.Three major questions will be investigated and discussed in this paper.1)What are the most commonly used clause types in students' compositions of English major? And how well are relative clauses(i.e.restrictive relative clauses and nonrestrictive clauses) used and mastered?2)How well can the learners use relative words to realize relative clauses? And what is the acquisition order of the four types of relative clauses-SS,SO,OS,and OO as found in the students' compositions?3)What are frequent manifestations of errors caused by mother tongue interference in the learners' use of relative clauses? What are the possible reasons for those interferences to occur? In order to find out the answers to these questions,a case study is carried out with subjects of 81 students of first-year English major from E-Commerce Department of Foreign Language School,Northeast Normal University.They have similar English learning background.And their compositions are used for analysis. By analyzing and studying the data collected from the students' compositions,the author found that the errors which the college students made in relative clauses in their English writings were connected closely with mother tongue interference.In the study the author found that the attributive clauses,adverbial clauses and the object clauses are most commonly used clause types in the students' compositions.Subject clauses, predicative clauses and appositive clauses are,however,rarely found.It seems that the attempt of using more complex sentences is a sign of students' learning to compose in English.Students with better English writing have used more complex sentences than those whose English is not quite well.They used more relative clauses,but produced fewer errors. In other words,the present study shows that mother tongue interference becomes weaker with the improvement of students' English proficiency.Relative clauses are the popular type of clauses Chinese learners at this level(e.g.intermediate) are willing to use in their compositions.From a longitudinal point of view,a large increase of using relative clauses(i.e. 42.4%and 32.3%,respectively) found in this study,as compared with Professor Yang's (1994)(i.e.17.1%),is obvious.That is to say,students used more relative clauses than those counterparts fifteen years ago.This gives a vivid illustration that Chinese students' English level has improved greatly with English crossing the boarder as an international language and with the Chinese open-door policy going forward.After analyzing the data about relative words,the author found that"Which,that,where, who"rank the first places in the writings by the two groups.In terms of creation of restrictive relative clauses,relative words such as"which,who,that"were used most commonly than"but,whose,who,whom,where,when,etc."and"Which"was used more commonly than others in the nonrestrictive clauses.From the data of this study,the obtained ordering of five types is SU＞DO＞OPREP＞GEN,but RC patterns is ordered as follows:OS＞SS＞OO＞SO＞O-Oprep＞S-Oprep.What clearly manifested in this order is that all RC types in the object position rank higher than those in the subject position.It reflects the students' difficulty hierarchy of RCs in our study.In the end,there are four categories interfered by native language when Chinese students use RCs and relative words in their English compositions,namely Underused(Including Avoidance),Redundant or omission(part),Misused and Misplaced.The main reason for interference is the great differences between English and Chinese languages,and the distance between culture and thought patterns.The writer hopes that the present thesis will be of some help to both language teachers and language learners.