The Contrast Of Word Order Between English And Chinese And Teaching Strategies

One of the characters of language is linearity which is called word order. Every language unit is arranged according to some order existing in language. The word order includes the sequence of morpheme, word, phrase sentence and sentence group and also the sequence of word-formation composition, sentence elements, syntactic component and sentence group. Most languages in the world can be classified into these three word order types:VSO, SVO, SOV. It can promote second-language learning if students’ first language and second language are in same word order type. English and Chinese are in the same type of SVO, so their basic word order are almost same and sentence elements’ order are changed in same way. The biggest character of Chinese is lacking of form change, so it has to use particles and change the word order to express different grammar and pragmatic meanings. English is typically rich in form change and word order is not so important as it’s to Chinese. In pragmatic context, English word order is more flexible than Chinese. The most complicated sequence for English and Chinese are the word order of attributive and adverbial In Chinese, attributive and adverbial words are in the front of the sentences and located before the centre word. While in English the single attributive is before the centre word while adverbial words stand after centre word in the back of the sentence and near to the end of sentences. When there are more than one attributive and adverbial words, the sequence of them are arranged according to their inner rules. The special sentences word order in Chinese have no parallelism in English and so it seems more complicated and be the difficulty for Chinese learners. According to analysis of questionnaire of English speakers, we found much more errors in Chinese attributive and adverbial words order and special sentences’word order. The main reasons are negative transfer of English and target language rules generalization. According to our analysis and different characters of both languages, we give some advice of teaching to improve Chinese acquisition, such as paying more attention to contrast and induction between the two languages and the teaching of pragmatic word order; teaching the word order step by step and balancing the difficulties according to different class; training students’language sense, and so on.