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Error Analysis on English Writings of Mongolian College Students

Author: TianQing
Tutor: ZhangErLi
School: Jilin University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Error analysis English writings Mongolian bilingualism interlingual interference
CLC: H319
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 193
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Abstract

At present, Chinese students’learning of English has been an issue that has attracted the attention of many foreign and Chinese researchers of the second language acquisition (SLA). English teaching and learning in minority regions requires much more attention than ever. Under the circumstance and the directions of the theories of SLA, the author sets the Mongolian-speaking English learners at the tertiary level as the subjects in this thesis.Error analysis (EA) is the analysis and study of the errors committed by second and foreign language learners. Among various scientific means in the field of language teaching, EA sticks out to be the most effective and accurate device in observing where the students’problems lay which feeds back the English teachers of on what respects and (probably) how they should better their teaching. Therefore, EA, as a suitable instrument, is adopted in this thesis.Presently, the majority of researches of EA have been conducted to study the case of those learners whose learning process is as follow:But the study is different in this thesis. It aims at exploring the errors made by the learners whose learning process is in such a way:As is shown in the above formula, during this process, the Mongolian students have acquired a good command of Chinese before they begin to learn English. Chinese is their second language (L2) and might act as a bridge between their mother tongue (MT) or the first language (L1) Mongolian and the target language (TL) or the foreign language (FL) English. This progress is more complicated than the regular learning process and has attracted enormous attention in the field of SLA research. Therefore the author of this thesis intends to take an Error analysis on Mongolian students’English writings.In this empirical study, 109 Mongolian English majors (five-year program) respectively in Grade 1 (31 students), Grade2 (39 students) and Grade 3 (39 students) from Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities ( IMUN) are the subjects, and with the instrument of questionnaires, interviews and the software such as SPSS 11.5, Excel, the author and two assistants identifies and classifies the errors in the subjects’English writings, and analyzes different categories of the errors for the purpose of uncovering of the sources of these errors committed by them.During the study, three main finding has been found. Firstly, among the errors, which are classified into lexical errors, morphological errors and syntactic errors, lexical errors increase as a student promotes to a higher grade. Secondly, between two categories of the errors distinguished by the sources of them—interlingual errors and intralingual errors—the latter take up a bigger proportion. Finally, the percentage of interlingual errors shows that language transfer does affect the Mongolian English learners to a fairly large degree in their learning experience. Among the interlingual errors, Chinese transfer plays a much larger part than Mongolian transfer does. Furthermore, in order to provide valuable information for more teachers and researchers, the author attempts to present some implications and suggestions according to the results of the study in last part.

Error Analysis on English Writings of Mongolian College Students

Abstract

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