（英语语言文学专业论文）语际错误——中国学生书面错误的纵向研究.pdf

摘要 外语学习是一个相当复杂的认知过程它牵涉到诸多不同的因素因此外语 学习者在运用目的语时所犯的言语错误也是多方面的 而且任何一种外语的教学 都是在学习者已经掌握了母语的条件下进行的因此学习者母语的因素对外语 学习的影响和作用便成了外语教学理论和外语教学实践不可回避的一个问题 研 究证明母语对外语学习有推进和阻碍的双重作用语际错误正是母语防碍外语 学习的结果本文作者以在实习中获得的第一手语料为基础归纳和分析了语际 错误在中国学生作文中的主要体现以及尝试探讨了对待语际错误的较为有效的 方法和手段在历时一年的研究中作者发现语际错误在学生所犯的全部错误中 仍占有相当大的比重主要体现在一致词序词性混淆以及从句关系代词省略 等方面另外在对待以上错误的态度上学生们不是抛绣球把错误改正的重担 仍给老师而是倾向于老师指导下的自身的主动参与这反映了外语学习者不断 走向成熟和理智 关键词外语学习语际错误错误反馈 abstract affected by variant and multifarious factors, second language acquisition is so complex a cognitive process to the extent that foreign language learners incline to make errors of many kinds in the process of language learning. moreover, the teaching and learning of a foreign language is conducted in the wake of the mastery of the mother tongue of language learners. therefore it is inevitable to face and study the influence of mother tongue in foreign language teaching and learning. researches have proved that mother tongue plays a double role, facilitating or hindering foreign language learning. based on first-hand language corpus accumulated from the writers teaching experience, the paper aims to classify and analyze those interlingual errors which still account for a large proportion and attempts to find out the effective corrective feedback. the longitudinal study suggests that salient interlingual errors manifest themselves in the following aspects as agreement, word order, parts of speech and omission of relative pronouns as well. furthermore with regard to how to treat errors, students preferred teacher-directed self-correction which involves the students active engagement in language learning. key words: foreign language learning, interlingual errors, corrective feedback - 1 - introduction the most important task of foreign language teaching is to teach the students how to communicate in the target language accurately and fluently. however, it is inevitable that a lot of problems occur in this field. the most important one is “students errors”. norrish (1983) defines errors as a systematic deviation from the accepted code. the use of “systematic” in this context implies that there may be errors which are random. as it is a well-known fact that in normal speech in ones native language, s/he continuously commits errors of one sort or another due to some reasons expressed by corder (1967) as memory lapses, physical states, such as tiredness and psychological conditions such as strong emotion. this can happen while using the target language as well. these types of errors are called as mistakes which must certainly be separated from systematic deviancies- errors. this paper focuses on the errors made by chinese students, who learn english as a foreign language. they hear and practice the target language only in the classroom. a great number of errors they make result mainly from their own formation of the language. the errors may also arise as a result of language data they are presented with by the textbook, or by the teacher; some problems can be explained as interference phenomena. errors committed by the students are important for two reasons: first, they demonstrate the students language development for the teacher; second, unless they are corrected in an appropriate way they may become fossilized. the whole paper falls into four chapters. chapter 1 purports to set up a theoretical background by giving a detailed description of the two contrasting language learning theories. one window to probe into second language acquisition is through the window of the study of learner errors committed by second language learners in the process of language learning. in chapter 2, the definition of errors and error treatment is given and a review of error treatment trends and issues are made with the aim of delineating a framework for the study carried out later. chapter 3 is an intricate description of the data errors collected from the compositions of my students with some interpretations concerning the role of chinese in the english language - 2 - learning process. another focus of this paper is chapter 4 where different correction techniques are discussed concerning their effectiveness and the students preferences. meanwhile some suggestions are offered with regard to the future application of the techniques in classrooms with the purpose of casting some light to the english teaching pedagogy in china. - 3 - chapter 1 two contrastive views of language learning generally speaking, second language acquisition purports to study the nature and process of language acquisition. its this characteristic that pulls the researchers to connect it with the study of first language acquisition. whats more, understanding it requires drawing upon knowledge of psychology, linguistics, sociology etc. psycholinguists who have been engaged in the study of language and the mind have put forward a number of language learning theories, among which behaviorist learning theory and mentalist learning theory are the two representatives. we shall look at each in turn. 1.1 behaviorist views of language learning it was commonly believed that learning a language was a matter of habit formation. the learners utterances were thought to be gradually shaped towards those of the language he was learning. for instance, a young child when learning a mother tongue, uttered sounds similar to those of the mother tongue, which was often encouraged and rewarded by the parents. this rewarding led in turn to repetition of the utterance and the subsequent formation of linguistic habits. this brief and somewhat over-simplified account contains the essence of the behaviourist notion of language learning. behaviorist learning theory was the dominant psychological theory of the 1950s and 1960s. according to this theory, language learning is like any other kind of learning in that it involves habit formation. habits are formed when learners respond to stimuli in the environment and subsequently have their responses reinforced so that they are remembered. thus a habit is a stimulus-response connection. it was believed that all behavior, including the kind of complex behavior found in language learning, could be explained in terms of habits. when learners have the opportunity to practise making the correct response to a given stimulus, learning took place. when the response is correct, the learner tends to receive a positive - 4 - reinforcement that encourages him to repeat the utterance later when needed. hence through several repetitions the utterance finally becomes habitualized and therefore reaches the final stage of being acquired. on the other hand, if a response is incorrect or not made, it is not likely to be reinforced, or that the reinforcement is a negative one. on such occasions the utterance can not be acquired due to absence of repetition. that is to say, learners imitated models of correct language and received positive reinforcement if they were correct and got negative reinforcement if they were incorrect. for example, learners might hear the sentence give me a cup of coffee, and use it themselves and therefore might be rewarded by being given a cup of coffee when they uttered this sentence. in such a way their communication goal was achieved. since learning takes place only when a proper habit is being formed by reinforcement, errors were considered to be a wrong response to the stimulus, which should be corrected immediately after they were made. unless corrected properly, the error became a habit and a wrong behavioral pattern would stick in your mind. this viewpoint of learning influenced greatly the language classroom, where teachers concentrated on the mimicry and memorization of target forms and tried to instill the correct patterns of the form into learners mind. if learners made any mistake while repeating words, phrases or sentences, the teacher corrected their mistakes immediately. errors were regarded as something you should avoid and making an error was considered to be fatal to proper language learning process. this belief of learning was eventually discarded by the well-known radically different perspective proposition (chomsky, 1957). he wrote in his paper against b.f. skinner, that human learning, especially language acquisition, cannot be explained by simply starting off with a tabula rasa state of mind. he claimed that human beings must have a certain kind of innate capacity which can guide you through a vast number of sentence generation possibilities and have a child acquire a grammar of that language until the age of five or six with almost no exception. he called this capacity universal grammar and claimed that it is this very human faculty that linguistics aims to pursue. - 5 - this shift toward a rationalistic view of language ability led many language teachers to discredit the behaviouristic language learning style and emphasize cognitive-code learning approach. hence, learners were encouraged to work on more conscious grammar exercises based on certain rules and deductive learning began to be focused again. this application of new linguistic insights, however, did not bear much fruit since chomsky himself commented that a linguistic theory of the kind he pursued had little to offer for actual language learning or teaching (chomksy, 1966). undoubtedly there is much in this theory which is valuable and worthy of our attention and behaviorists take what can be observed objectively and scientifically as the resources of their research. one of its major attractions was that it provided a theoretical account of how the learners first language intruded into the process of second language acquisition. in other words, in addition to offering a general picture of second language acquisition as habit formation, it also explained why the second language learner made errors. however, like any other theories which have undergone their ups and downs, the behaviorist learning theory also came into the same dilemma due to some inborn and uprooted limitations. first, behaviorist accounts of l2 acquisition emphasized only what can be directly observed, (i.e. the input to the learner and the learners own output) and ignored what goes on in the learners mind. secondly, behaviorism cannot adequately account for l2 acquisition since learners frequently dont produce output that simply reproduces the input. furthermore the systematic nature of their errors demonstrates that they are actively involved in constructing their own “rules” which sometimes bear little resemblance to the patterns of language modeled in the input rather than simply being passive receivers and imitators. thirdly, behaviorists consider reinforcements extremely significant in the learning process. however, as we can see, a child learning his mother tongue does not always receive a positive or negative reinforcement for each of his utterances. whats more, while behaviorists attach much importance to the outward structure of an utterance, an adult tends to pay attention to the meaning an utterance conveys and the communication of thoughts. due to the above inadequacies, this behaviorist learning theory began to lose its - 6 - official favor from the 1960s onwards and a mentalist theory of language learning began to win its ground. 1.2 mentalist theory of language learning the 1960s witnessed a major shift in thinking in psychology and linguistics. formerly preoccupied with the role of nurture (i.e. how environmental factors shape learning), researchers switched their attention to nature (i.e. how the innate properties of the human mind shape learning). therefore this new paradigm was mentalist in orientation. according to this theory, only human beings are capable of language learning, which makes them unique to other animals and they possess an inborn capacity for acquiring a language. this capacity is separate from any other cognitive capacity within the human mind, e.g. the capacity for logical reasoning and the lone task of this capacity lies in language learning. this equipped faculty is referred to as language acquisition device postulated by chomsky (1972) and shortened to lad. to the mentalists, the lad is specific to the human beings and never fails to operate in normal human beings. that is why any human being without any mental deficiency is able to acquire a language successfully. chomsky assumed that anybody acquiring a language is not just learning an accumulation of random utterances but a set of rules or underlying principles for forming speech patterns: “ the person who has acquired knowledge of a language has internalized a system of rules that relate sound and meaning in a particular way (chomsky 1972b:26). its these rules that enable a learner to produce an indefinite number of novel utterances, rather than straightforward and mechanic repetitions of old ones. for a child learning his mother tongue, the rules then are his own hypotheses about the structure of the language and may therefore be deviated from the adult language. these hypotheses are then tried out when the child produces his own language and are regularly checked against the further data exposed to him. he modifies and checks his hypothesis when he finds it fail to account for all the data. therefore what the child is doing is constructing an internal grammar of the language. and this grammar undergoes successive - 7 - modifications before it finally becomes the complete grammar of the target language. to explain what enables the lad to operate so quickly, the mentalists suppose that it may already contain some of the “universal” features which are found in all languages, such as the use of word-order to signal meaning, or basic relationship like that between subject and predicate. according to mentalist learning theory, language learning is not a straightforward process of habit formation through the chain of stimulus-response-reinforcement. nonetheless it is a cognitive process of rule construction through hypothesis-formation and hypothesis-testing. environment, as for language learning, is responsible for triggering the operation of the lad. it is necessary but not decisive for language acquisition since children cannot acquire a language only through pure exposure to linguistic environment. hence during the process of rule construction, the rules or hypotheses the child formulates are mostly incorrect or at least, incomplete before they are finally up to the standards of the adult language. while he is experimenting his hypothesis in his own production of the language, he will inevitably make mistakes, or errors. therefore, for the mentalists, commitment of errors is an unavoidable part in the whole process of language learning. errors may be indications of the childs progress in the course of learning, demonstrating that he has come to some rules of his own. for instance, forms that have been observed in the speech of children such as “ i eated my apple”, “ i not like the toy are not likely to be heard from an adult. this proves that something other than imitation of adult speech is going on. what is significant here is not that the child is making errors, but that he is generalizing the rules. from his errors we know he at least knows that the past tense of a verb is formed by the regular process of inflection and that the negative word is put before the main verb. it was s.p. corder who first advocated in english language teaching the importance of errors in language learning process. in corder (1967), he mentions the paradigm shift in linguistics from a behavioristic view of language to a more rationalistic view and claims that in language teaching one noticeable effect is to shift the emphasis away from teaching towards a study of learning. he emphasizes great - 8 - potential for applying new hypotheses about how language items are learned in l1 to the learning of a second language. he says “within this context the study of errors takes on a new importance and will i believe contribute to a verification or rejection of the new hypothesis.” (in richards 1974: 21) corder goes on to say that in l1 acquisition we interpret childs incorrect utterances as being evidence that he is in the process of acquiring language and that for those who attempt to describe his knowledge of the language at any point in its development, it is the errors which provide the important evidence.(ibid.:23) in second language acquisition, corder proposed as a working hypothesis that some of the strategies adopted by the learner of a second language are substantially the same as those by which a first language is acquired. by classifying the errors that learners made, researchers could learn a great deal about the sla process by inferring the strategies that second language learners were adopting. for learners themselves, errors are indispensable, since the making of errors can be regarded as a device the learner uses in order to learn. (selinker 1992:150) the mentalist views on language learning, like those of the behaviorists, are valuable for us to make use of in teaching a second language. however, every coin has two sides. in so far as it is perhaps the most comprehensive about language learning. however, as i shall attempt to show later, the theory is seriously flawed in a number of respects, or rather some points on which researchers have not yet reached an agreement. first of all, is there really a black box-lad in our brain? the lad is merely supposed to be existent. chomsky made his hypothesis through examination of language learning process and his own logical reasoning. however, there is no scientific evidence to sho