The Contrastive-Error Analysis Of Oral English Grammar By College Non-English Majors

The Chinese language is a kind of language without morphological change,it has the characteristic of "parataxis".Different from Chinese,English is a "morphological" language,it has the characteristic of "hypotaxis".In oral English communication,Chinese students usually focus on the meaning transmission and neglect the importance of language form.However,the grammatical error in language form of English will make a significant difference on meaning.Meanwhile,from the perspective of language typology,Chinese as an"Isolated Language",it is different from any other Indo-European languages.There has been a lot of researches on the oral English teaching,but the study of error analysis on oral English combined with the contrastive analysis is not sufficient.Also,during the sample collection process,there are many variable factors that might influence the result of error analysis,like gender,English competence of the subjects,and if the subjects get notification or not,etc.But the previous researches don't take these variable factors into consideration.Thus this thesis starts from the basis of linguistic theory by combining contrastive analysis with error analysis together,and makes an error analysis on the oral English grammar of college non-English majors with new sampling method.During the sample collection process,the author selects 48 non-English major students from Northwestern University.The subjects are divided into 12 groups according to their CET grade,gender,with or without notification.The author collects 48 questionnaires and the time duration of recording files is more than 3 hours.This thesis focuses on following questions:(1)What are the major differences between Chinese and English,and its influence to Chinese students?(2)What are the major errors in Chinese students' oral English?(3)What are the influences from the variable factors during the sample collection process?The author draws the following conclusions:(1)From the perspective of contrastive analysis,this thesis summarizes the major differences between English and Chinese from pronunciation,word,and sentence.The influence of these difference might make are also summarized.Meanwhile,this thesis stresses the great significance of studying the contrastive analysis between Chinese and English for Chinese students.(2)The results of error analysis further testify the possible errors predicted by the constrastive analysis.The errors of Chinese students in oral English mainly in the morphological change of language forms.The error of omission,misordering and addition are few.(3)The influence of other variable factors on the errors are as follows:gender has little influence,the errors' amount reflects a positive correlation with the factor of CET grade,and the error amount of students with notification is 30%lower than the students without notification.Due to the limitation of the research and the ability of the author,there still has some deficiency in this research,which are demonstrated in the after,in order to supply a reference for later researchers.