Application Of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis In Analyzing English Written Errors Of Junior High Students

It is acknowledged that language is mainly used for communication, and writing calls for more communicative competence than other forms. So if EFL learners can express themselves properly, effectively or even wonderfully in written English, they are successful learners in a sense. In the past few decades, some modern teaching approaches such as the Functional-Notional Approach and Communicative Approach, Task-Based Language Teaching, etc. were adopted in current English teaching. Their advocators maintain that native language should be abandoned or strictly limited. However, the outcomes of English teaching are not so satisfying. Although students'oral work has been improved considerably as a whole, the same cannot be said of their writing.Composition is a most difficult task and painstaking work of the four basic skills in language learning. Students'English compositions are inevitably influenced by Chinese language. This has been a hard nut to crack.In the1950s, structural linguist Lado promoted contrastive analysis (CA) as an important part of foreign language teaching methodology. The aim of CA is, by comparison of learners'mother tongue and the target language, to find out the similarities of the two languages so as to help the learners in their success with positive transfer, and to identify the differences between them so as to prevent negative transfer. In this way, the learners will consciously avoid or make less linguistic errors.English and Chinese belong to different language families. (Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan Family, while English belongs to Indo-European Family.) Chinese students learn English in an environment without English. They are easily affected by previous language learning experience and the Chinese culture. Chinglish (Chinese English) --- the erroneous or inappropriate product from the use of Chinese patterns or rules in English--- prevails in their written work. This paper aims to collect and analyze errors quantitatively in junior middle school students'compositions. A qualitative contrastive analysis is done of English and Chinese in vocabulary and syntax.The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the whole thesis, starting with the aim of the research. Chapter 2 is a literature review --- a brief introduction of the theories of contrastive analysis and the concerned studies done in this field. Chapter 3, which is the main body of the thesis, investigates mother tongue interference at lexical and syntactic levels in Chinese learners'writings. In this chapter there are descriptions of the major differences between the two languages, followed by an analysis of the errors and improper expressions mainly collected from subjects'compositions, which are attributed to mother tongue interference. On the basis of the previous chapter some solutions are offered in Chapter 4 with the aim of helping learners minimize their errors and overcome their difficulties in their process of learning to write in English.