A Research On Syntactic Errors In Chinese College Students’ English Writings Based On Conceptual Transfer Theory

Language transfer is one of the key issues in second language acquisition.According to Odlin(2005),transfer that only occurs at the level of language form and meaning,not involving the modulation or change of the conceptual category of the source language is called semantic transfer.Conceptual transfer is a kind of transfer which refers to the modulation or change of the conceptual category of the source language.Conceptual transfer as the latest developmental direction in second language acquisition reveals the reasons from a cognitive perspective that account for language transfer.Due to the differences of syntactic structures between English and Chinese,the acquisition of English syntax constitutes difficult points of learning English.Chinese is a paratactic language which emphasizes the meaning of a sentence,while English is a hypotactic language which emphasizes the form and logic of a sentence.Thus,under the influence of the way of thinking pattern,Chinese is a language that pays attention to meaning,while English is focused on grammatical structure.During the recent few years,a conceptual transfer-based cognitive approach has been taken to do researches on second language acquisition.Zhang & Liu(2013)did a research on preposition learning in English and Fan(2014)did a research on English article errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer.Different from previous researches,the present study attempts to analyze the syntactic errors occur in non-English majors’ writings.By doing this,the author attempts to find answers to the following three questions:(1)What kinds of syntactic errors occur in the students’ compositions,and which kinds of errors are in higher frequency?(2)How does Chinese syntax affect second language output during the secondlanguage acquisition?(3)The learners can commit errors when making English sentences,so what are the underlying causes of syntactic errors in their writings from the perspective of conceptual transfer?The research methods employed in the study are a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.The quantitative approach is used to calculate the numbers of the errors and their frequencies in the writings.While qualitative approach is employed to describe the types and causes of errors.In this thesis,the data is 300 writing samples collected from 300non-English major students in Shanxi Normal University.The study is conducted in order to find the main types of syntactic errors and analyze the possible causes of the syntactic transfer errors and offer proper pedagogical implications.In addition,interview is conducted in order to have a better understanding of the possible causes of the errors.After the analysis and discussion,it is revealed that(1)There are probably ten kinds of syntactic errors in the compositions,among which the errors of disagreement and serial-verb construction are at higher frequency.(2)In the process of English writings,Chinese learners’ thinking pattern and conceptual category have been transferred,as a result,Chinese learners produce English sentence which is the same pattern as Chinese sentence.(3)The underlying cause of syntactic errors in the non-English major students’ compositions can be summarized as mis-mobilization of L1-based concepts in the production of L2 and mis-construction of L2-based concepts.