The Application Of The English-Chinese Contrastive Method To Senior English Teaching

The theory of contrastive analysis was first posited by Charles Fries, an American linguist, in his book Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language published in 1947. Ten years later, another American linguist Robert Lado wrote Linguistics across Culture and put the theory of contrastive analysis into practice. On the other hand, a contrastive study on English and Chinese began with Ma Jianzhong's 马氏文通(1898). Over 100 years up to present, it has been an independently specialized subject. For example, Mao Guoan (2004)'s A Practical Course in Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese is listed among textbooks series for tertiary English majors. Contrastive analysis based on psychological transfer theory compares the linguistic systems of two languages in order to discover their similarities and differences and explain the phenomena of negative transfer of the native language. Its basic purposes are to provide basis for the selection and grading of teaching materials and for the organization and designing of syllabuses, and at the same time to help the English learners predict and overcome the bad effects of their native language on English. Thus, they will form the mode of thinking like the native speakers of English for successful across-culture communication when they are learning English through contrast and comparison between English and Chinese.Considering that the brain of senior high school students (15—18 years old) has nearly developed to the brain of the adults and that they have become accustomed to Chinese thinking stereotype, the writer thinks it is rather difficult to eliminate "interference of Chinese" in the way of numerous and repeated pattern drills in class, which possibly leads to the fact that the more work is done and the more time is taken but the result is not so good. It is still discovered that negative transfer of Chinese results in lots of Chinglish phenomena in the students' English expression. For example, in vocabulary, the Chinese language, a typical isolating language, causes the students to ignore the changes in the word forms;According to the Chinese explanations, they take the word-to-word equivalences between Chinese and English meanings for granted. In sentence patterns, with Chinese parataxis in mind they write down many sentences lacking in conjunctions. In text, spiral thought pattern of Chinese brings out too manytheme breaks in the students' compositions. In conversational pragmatics, it's easy for the westerners to misunderstand that the Chinese students are rudely inquiring their privacy during the daily conversation, while Chinese regard knowing the others' age, income, health and marriage as a way to care for each other. So the writer collects a great number of such examples and analyzes them contrastively. What's better, from the angle of the interlanguage development, he argues that the "C/E translation" exercise is an effective measure to act out the contrastive analysis in English teaching.Besides, the writer started to do an experiment on applying contrastive analysis to senior English teaching in Class One of Senior Grade One in Wuhan No.68 High School in September, 2005. The experiment was the "C/E translation" activity. Some Chinese sentences or short Chinese passages were given to his students each time. After they finished their translation, the writer provided them with some appropriate versions. At the end of this term, in order to verify whether the method is more effective or not, the writer compared his experimental class's scores with a controlled class's scores in the unified final-examination of Wunhan. All the statistic results show the significant advantage of E/C contrastive analysis method. It will also make us more aware that the application of this method to senior English teaching will be practical as well as operative.