A Study On The Errors Of Chinese College EFL Learners' Oral Response Forms To The English Negative Yes/No Questions

Negative Yes/No question is one of the most commonly used questions in daily conversation.Since there are syntactic,semantic,and pragmatic differences between Chinese and English in terms of the negative Yes/No question,especially its oral response form,Chinese EFL learners are then confused by this inconsistency,and thus conduct errors in putting them into actual use.Therefore,this thesis aims to analyze Chinese college EFL learners' acquisition of oral responses to the negative Yes/No questions.There are three research questions in this study:(1)Is there a positive correlation betweenChinese college EFL learners' English proficiency and their acquisition of the oral response forms to negative Yes/No questions?(2)What errors would Chinese college EFL learners make in conducting oral responses to the negative Yes/No questions?(3)What are thecauses of Chinese college EFL learners' errors in conducting oral responses to these questions?To answer the above research questions,contrastive analysis,error analysis,and the theory of interlanguage were applied as the theoretical basis.90 undergraduate students at Northwest Normal University were selected as the subjects;they were divided into three groups according to their scores on the English subject of the College Entrance Examination.The research instruments are an oral test and a follow-up interview.SPSS20.0was used to analyze language data.The results show that there is a positive correlation betweenChinese college EFL learners' English proficiency and their acquisition of the oral response forms to negative Yes/No questions;Chinese college EFL learners often produce substance errors,text errors,and discourse errors when conducting oral responses to the negative Yes/No questions;the negative transfer of learners' first language,the semantic differences between English and Chinese in terms of the negative Yes/No questions,and the distinction of the cognitive interpretation to the negative Yes/No question in English and Chinese are the three major reasons to learners' errors.