An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of The Different Chinese And English Thought Patterns On Chinese Middle School Students' English Writing

People's mind can be expressed by using a certain language.Writing is one of the most effective ways.Different cultures possess different languages,and the thought patterns of people from a certain culture may also be specific.The way they use a language to write is different.Since Chinese and westerners are under the different influence of geography,history,culture and traditional philosophy of their own country,they have formed their own specific language,culture and thought pattern.Thought pattern is one of the fundamental parts in cultural study,so it is meaningful to study the impacts of thought patterns upon writing.English writing is essential to both English learning and teaching.Despite of the great efforts being made by Chinese students and teachers in English acquisition,students' English compositions are still far from being satisfactory.Many Chinese middle school students have difficulty in writing fluent English compositions because they are usually influenced by the Chinese thought pattern more or less and it is difficult for them to jump out of it when writing in English.Therefore,based on the author's own teaching practice,this thesis mainly focuses on the current situation of English writing of middle school students,and then discusses and studies it from the perspective of the differences between Chinese and Western thought patterns.The purpose is to have a deeper understanding of the basic condition of their English writing,to find out the existing problems and analyze their reasons,finally to propose solutions so that students' English thinking abilities as well as their English writing competence can be cultivated well through some effective teaching methods proposed in the study.This thesis mainly consists of five parts.In the first chapter of this thesis,the author introduces the research background,the purpose and the significance of the study.In the second chapter,the author reviews the general situation and development process of writing teaching at home and abroad,describes the relationship between language and thought,and next some related theories,and then elaborates on the fourdifferent thought patterns between Chinese and English.All these provide abundant theoretical knowledge and reference points for this study.On this basis,the author determines to study the influence of Chinese and English thinking differences on middle school students' English writing.And in the third chapter,the empirical study process is designed according to the differences of thought patterns and the problems existing in middle school students' English writing by doing a study of Hangzhou Sandun Middle School.This study attempts to answer the following three questions:1)In which aspects do the differences between Chinese and English thought patterns influence Chinese middle school students' English writing?2)What is the root cause of the difficulties for middle school students' English writing?3)How can the Chinese middle school students' English thought patterns be developed to help improve their English writing?Therefore,in view of the above objectives,the research methods applied in the study are a questionnaire and some studies of the students' writing samples in Hangzhou Sandun Middle School.In the fourth chapter,the study mainly focuses on the errors which often appear in Chinese middle school students' English compositions,for instance,word usage is not suitable,syntax and discourse are not reasonable,etc.On the whole,the research and analysis of this thesis are carried out at three levels.First,the diction level,in which there are mainly three kinds of lexical errors,including word usage errors,collocation errors and word choice errors.Secondly,the syntactical level,in which,influenced by mother tongue thinking,there are four kinds of typical syntactical mistakes in students' English compositions,such as “Chinglish” expressions,errors in the subject,errors in the omission of conjunction words and errors in the sentence structures.Thirdly,in terms of discourse level,special attention is paid to the misunderstanding or misuse of English topic sentences and the unreasonable text construction.From the analysis of this study,we can draw the conclusion that there exist plenty of errors in students' English compositions at the levels of diction,syntax and discourse.On the surface,these problems seem to be caused by the grammatical errors.While in depth,they are attributed to different thought patterns between the Chinese and English languages,which are also the reasons of too many“Chinglish” expressions in Chinese middle school students' English writing.Therefore,only by understanding the differences can the students learn to reduce the interference of mother tongue thinking in writing.Based on the study,in the fifth chapter,the author proposed some tentative measures for the improvement of students' writing.The training of the students' writing ability in English can not only be confined to the training of language skills or vocabularies.Instead,we should start from comparing the differences of Chinese and Western thought patterns to enable students to get more awareness of the two thought patterns.This is beneficial to help students understand why they make mistakes in diction,syntax and discourse and then we can effectively improve students' English writing skills and abilities.After the study,the thesis stresses that only by writing in a more native-like thought pattern are the students able to write more idiomatic English compositions.The findings of this study suggest that the combination of the contrast between Chinese and English thought patterns and the learners' cognitive training of English thinking mode in the English writing teaching of middle schools is an effective way.