Error Analysis Of Spoken English Interlanguage Of Chinese English Major

Interlanguage is first raised by the American psycholinguist Selinker in1969, and then in his paper Interlanguage which was published in1972he explained that "Interlanguage refers to the separateness of a second language learner’s system, a system that has a structurally intermediate status between the native and target language." The viewpoint has won increasing attention among many researchers, from then on, a great number of studies relating to interlanguage from diverse angles and with various research methods have come forward continually contributing a lot to its development and providing the second and foreign language teaching with many useful suggestion. Considering interlanguage is an intermediate system which will be undoubtedly full of many errors, a lot of researchers abroad begin to have an attempt to study the interlanguage by making an analysis of the errors in it, many researchers at home also take this kind of research method to explore interlanguage at the end of the20th century, it is a truth that they do have made some successes, but there are still some deficiencies, for example the study of the errors of spoken English interlanguage of Chinese English learners is rare and most of the former studies did not use the theories of error analysis critically. Therefore, on the basis of the spoken English learning characteristics of the Chinese English learners and the fruits of the former theoretical and empirical studies of error analysis, an analytical frame of errors which is more suitable to the present study is constructed in this thesis, and basing on this frame, the author will make an empirical study on the spoken English interlanguage of Chinese learners majoring in English by grouping the errors of the spoken English interlanguage of learners and analyzing the reasons causing errors, moreover, the author will explore if there are differences in making errors between two different grades of learners and what the differences are. Specifically, three key research questions are thus addressed:(1) What is the distribution of errors in the spoken English interlanguage of Chinese learners majoring in English?(2) Which kind of error can distinct the senior class of Chinese learners majoring in English from the junior one?(3) What are the reasons causing these errors?Basing on the principle of convenience and voluntariness, the subjects investigated in this study are two natural classes from grade one and grade three of English major who have learned English as a foreign language and from the school of foreign studies of Yangtze university. Both the means used to collect and the ways used to analyze the data are of diversity and pertinence in the thesis to achieve at answering the questions sufficiently. In the aspect of collecting the data, there are three instruments, which are:the questionnaire, which is used to obtain the background information of the subjects; the spoken English investigation, which contains two kinds of investigation, the first one is letting the subjects do a three minutes preparation for a given topic and then do a three minutes English presentation, the second one is letting the subjects do a think-aloud preparation for a given topic and then three minutes English presentation and then the retrospective verbal reporting, which will help the author do a more objective and complete analysis of the data; and the semi-structure interview, which is used as an added tool to perfect the data from the retrospective verbal report and as an exploration of the real expectations of the subjects to English learning and teaching. All of the data of the spoken English test will be recorded and part of them will be transcribed following the transcribing principles of authenticity, complete annotation and accuracy proposed by WeiNaixing (2007). Through the analysis of the data, the results obtained in this thesis suggest that:(1) Basing on the data of group B (that is, the group which will have a think-aloud preparation of the topic, then after three minutes’English presentation they will have a verbal retrospection), the distribution of errors of the junior English learners is as follow:phonetic errors (29.36%)> seman-pragmatic errors (22.48%)> syntactic errors (19.72%)> lexical errors (14.68%)> discourse errors (13.76%); the senior English learners, seman-pragmatic errors (33.80%)> syntactic errors (18.62%)> discourse errors (17.93%)> lexical errors (16.55%)> phonetic errors (13.10%);(2) Uniting the results from the descriptive statistic method the statistic software SPSS, it is found that among the five kinds of errors, the phonetic errors can be used to distinct the senior English learners and the junior English learners;(3) Basing on the data from the questionnaire and the recording material of the spoken English investigation and the semi-interview, and using the inducing method, it is found that the lack of the spoken English knowledge and the negative influence of the mother language are the two main reasons for their making errors in speaking English.