A Study On The Use Of Lexicalized Causative Verbs In Chinese Students' English Writing

Language transfer has long been a central topic in Second Language Acquisition. Second language writing is one of the linguistic skills that must be mastered by learners. The impact of first language upon the second language writing has long been a heated topic.This thesis focuses on language transfer from the perspective of the degree of lexicalization which is connected with synthetic expression and analytic expressions (Cai Jigang,2005:53). English is more lexicalized in expressing causative concepts and is inclined to synthetic expressions, while Chinese is fewer lexicalized and analytic expressions are more often used (Zhang Jidong & Liu Ping,2005:35). Chinese students are inclined to overuse "Make+Object+Complement" causative verb structures while ignore corresponding lexicalized verbs (Zhang Jidong & Liu Ping,2005:35) In this thesis, experiments are conducted to testify the following hypothesis:1) Chinese students at low proficiency level in English writing are inclined to overuse "Make+Object+Complement" structure and ignore corresponding lexicalized causative verbs.2) The proper use of lexicalized causative verbs is a sign of maturity of SL students' English writing.3) The Contrastive Analysis method applied in teaching lexicalized causative verbs is helpful to improve the students' writing ability.The author firstly selects Model Compositions by Students of Peking University (2) and Model Compositions of IELTS Writing as the high-score compositions, and the 90 pre-test compositions by the subjects as the low-score ones. A quantitative and contrastive analysis on the use of "Make+Object+Complement" structure and lexicalized causative verbs between them is conducted. Then followed the comparison between the compositions of high-score group (score≥11) and low-score group (score<8) within the subjects. The results testify the first two hypotheses, i.e. high-score compositions are inclined to use more lexicalized causative verbs.Then a three-month teaching experiment is conducted. Under the guidance of CA method, the teaching of lexicalized causative verbs is highlighted by the intensified training on the aspects such as rewriting, raising students' awareness and recitation. The pre-test and after-test data are collected and analyzed by statistical computing formula with the help of Excel and further confirmed by SPSS. As it turns out, there is significant difference between the experimental group and control group. Experimental results show that after the three-month experiment, students in experimental class students increased their frequency in using lexicalized verbs and thus make significant progresses in their writing. Then methods such as Vocabprofile and interview are employed to probe the causes of Chinese students' overusing "Make +Object+Complement" structure and ignoring corresponding lexicalized causative verbs. Finally, some pedagogical implications for English language teaching and learning are offered...