Obstacles and Solutions fo Chinese Students in Learning English(新).doc

OBSTACLES AND SOLUTIONS FOR CHINESE STUDENTS IN LEARNING ENGLISHByDou Juan Under the supervision ofLi Yi A Thesis Submitted toForeign Languages Departmentin Partial Fulfillment of the Requirementsfor the Degree of Bachelor of ArtsQinghai Normal UniversityMay, 2012AcknowledgmentsI would like to take this chance to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Li Yi, who is the lecturer in the Foreign Languages and Literature Department for her kindly assistance and valuable suggestions during the process of my thesis writing. Her willingness to give her time so generously has been very much appreciated. My gratitude also extends to all the teachers who taught me during my undergraduate years for their kind encouragement and patient instructions. Last but not the least, I would like to offer my particular thanks to my friends and family, for their encouragement and support for the completion of this thesis.AbstractWith the development of the current society, it is necessary for us to learn English well. More and more emphasis has been put on the real ability in English learning, so English learners try hard to improve their English learning skills. But now, many college students do not have the satisfied English learning capacity. Their learning ability need to be improved. Although English teachers and learners spend much time on English teaching and learning, it seems that English learners still have much problems in English learning. Therefore, there are many factors that affect Chinese students through their learning. The paper analysis the causes of these problems,such as cross-cultural barriers, limited thinking style and bad habits, shortage of motivation, and so on; it also provides some possible solutions to help Chinese students to overcome the obstacles existing English learning.Key words: English learning; factors; learning habits; solutions; obstacles摘要随着社会的发展，对于我们来说学好英语是很必要的。人们也越来越重视学习英语的真正能力，因此英语学习者努力学好英语学习的技能。但是现如今大学生的英语学习能力并不令人满意，在英语学习中存在各种问题与障碍。因而如何解决这些问题，克服学习中的障碍提高大学生英语学习能力是我们所共同探讨的话题。所以尽管英语教师和英语学习者分别在英语教学上和英语学习上花费了很长时间，英语学习者似乎仍然不得要领。在中国学生学习过程中有很多因素会影响他们的英语学习。这篇文章分析了这些问题出现的原因，比如跨文化障碍，限制的思维模式和不良的习惯，动机的缺乏等。也为中国学生提出了一些克服英语学习中障碍的解决方法。 关键词：英语学习；因素；学习习惯；解决方法；障碍11 Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsiiAbstractiii摘 要ivTable of Contents1I. Introduction2II. Obstacles that Chinese Students Faced in English Learning.3A. Bad Habits in English Learning3B. Knowledge Obstacles.4 1. Grammar Obstacles.4 2.Cultural Background of Knowledge Obstacles.5 C. Psychological Obstacles.5III. Solutions in Improving English6A. Accumulate Vocabulary6B. Strengthen Grammar.7C. Accumulate Cultural Background Knowledge8D. Cultivate Good Habits.9IV. Conclusion10Refrences11I. IntroductionA language is a system of communication used by the people of a particular country or a region for talking or writing purposes. Most languages have both oral or spoken, and written forms. Take English for example. Oral English is its spoken from while written English is its written form.1 and There are numerous varieties of the English language, and what we ordinarily mean by English is a common core or nucleus which is realized only in the different forms of the language that we actually hear or read. 2With the development of economy and globalization, English is one of the most important language in the world. In 2001, China entered the WTO. As China has opened itself more and more international businesses, Chinese people who have the ability to speak fluent English have a distinct advantage in this new global market. There can be no doubt that English is one of the worlds most widely used languages. People use a language in one of three ways: as a native language, as a second language, or as a foreign language. English is spoken as a native language by over three hundred million people in the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zea land, Canada, some Caribbean countries and South Africa. As a second language, English is often necessary for official business, education, information and other activities in many countries, it is one of the few working languages of the United Nations.It is said that English has become the language of international trade and transport. Most pilots in planes traveling from one country to another use it to talk with airports. All ships sailing on the oceans call for help by radio in it. It has been said that 60 percent of the worlds radio broad casts and 70 percent of the worlds mail uses English. At international sports meets, and international of scientists English is the language most commonly used and the most widely used.English has in fact become the language of international cooperation is science and technology. The most advanced resuits in space, nuclear and computer research are published in it. A scientist who speaks and writes English is in closer touch with the scientists in other countries than one who doesnt.In recent years, employment opportunities increase for anybody connected with English-dominated business culture of today. Therefore, more and more people in our country begin to study English. However in learning English, skills plays a very important role. In our daily life, many sides indicate that skills are very important. People need to develop their learning ability so as to benefit from it and master this kind of language. But many students still have many difficulties in learning English well, though they spend much time, energy and money on it. II. Obstacles that Chinese Students Faced in English Learning.Of all the many hundreds and thousands of languages around the world, English can be considered as one of the most difficult to learn. There are many reasons why learning English is such a difficult task. The Chinese language is totally different from the English language. The former belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and the later belongs to the Indo-European language family. Therefore, when Chinese learners try to understand English and study it well, they usually face many linguistic problems in various respects, such as spelling, gender, verb forms, tenses and so on. In addition to these, the essay discusses some other obstacles in English learning, like bad habits, cross-cultural barriers in English learning, limited of thinking style, shortage of motivation. The following are some of the most frequent obstacles a learner of English may encounter:A. Bad Habits in English Learning As we all know, the habits is one of the most important factors in learning. Habit is a behavior or a tendency which formed in a long-term living. A good habit benefits a person for a life time. Bad habits seriously affect students learning ability. The good habits will improve the English learning skills while bad habits will made us leg behind. For students, good habit takes up an important part in English learning. These phenomena indicate that English learners must have a strong learning ability. For a long period of time, traditional Chinese education is far from regarding students learning methods as a certain skill to be taught. Some of them even dont get the training for learning skills at schools or colleges. So the students do not know how to learn and they develop the bad habits that greatly hinder their learning efficiency. Therefore, it is very necessary to improve the learning ability. First, take English reading as example: When students doing their reading, they rely on dictionary. Students always search for dictionary when they met new words in reading precise. Through the way they can clear up the meaning of the new words. But it is easy for them to get into the habit of being addicted to recuing on dictionary and always it will slow down the speed of reading. If without the help of dictionary in the formal exam, students would have troubles in reading to the habit that searching for dictionary seriously influence the improvement of students ability. Second, they lack of integrity in English learning. When you face an essay or a passage, you should not only grip the meaning of sentence in the whole, or just understand one sentence. Many students usually are in chaos in the collection of sentence and sentence, paratroops and paragraphs.Third, students do not pay attention to their studies. They cannot concentrate on the study. Few students may think for something else in English study, so they can always find out that they can not study well. B. Knowledge Obstacles. 1. Grammar Obstacles.A practical English Grammar is intended for inter-mediate and advanced students.3To most learners, this is the most confusing part about learning English. This is because nouns, adjectives and adverbs are very different from those of their mother tongues. Since there is no specific order in grammar, learning and understanding the usage of the many different sentence structures takes time and effort.In the process of English learning, the grammar knowledge is also indispensable. The complicated words, sentences and sentences compose to discourse. This is the function of grammar. Because of the different in customs of the culture, English grammar and Chinese grammar also exists great differences. Lack of grammar knowledge would certain affect the quality of English learning. Especially when we hear or read something and we encounter with the clause, sentences and complex sentences, but also need to analyze the sentence structure to understand the meaning of the sentence if they do not have the strong grammar knowledge.A rule in grammar is a generalization. It is a formula that one makes to account for how a given grammatical construction usually behaves. A rule is not necessarily true in every instance.4 2. Cultural Background of Knowledge Obstacles. A persons cultural practices can affect their ability to learn English. For instance, in some cultures a woman tends to be the one to stay home and raise the children. They are less likely to be interacting with English speakers unlike a man who would be out in the workforce interacting with English speakers. As I teach my Chinese students I know they will live and work in an increasingly multi-cultural world in which they will need increasingly sophisticated cultural skills. As English majors they have a good start on learning those skills, but most Chinese learn English in addition to another specialty, they also need cross-cultural skills.5In many circumstances, what puzzled students are not how to correctly pronounce and spell a word, but how to use it properly. For this kind of word, teachers should teach not only the literal meaning, but also its cultural connotation. For example, when teach “red”, “the value of color” should be introduced. Chinese like red color, in our own culture, red symbols auspicious and jubilation. But in English, most phrases with red are pejorative, for example, in the red, red light district, red flag. Besides, red in Chinese has the meaning of revolution and justice, which does not exit in English. Another example, green in Chinese means energetic, in English, it refers to lacking of experience or unhealthy, so, new comers in office are called green hands; envy is translated into green-eyed-monster; pale look for illness is described as green with illness.C. Psychological Obstacles.English learning is a complex intellectual activity which is affected by many factors. A psychology autistics (new edition) who name is Guy shogun has pointed out that English learning is consistent with language comprehension a complicate and general comprehension in a complicated psycholinguistic poss. It is annotative porous between the reader and the text. Some of the students as the basis of poor English, their exam are not ideal, causing them to lose confidence in learning English, so that in answering the teachers questions, they demonstrated tension, anxiety, or even just give up. Many students also emphasis on the objective reason. They always complain about their English foundation is very bad, and take this as the main reason of this phenomenon but not from their own learning attitude and method of learning which leading to learning remain stagnant, even getting worse.III. Solutions in Improving English Knowledge is power. Now English has been the international language. Its importance is self evident. It is an urgent problem for college students to improve English level. There are some strategies in improving English. A. Accumulate Vocabulary Nowadays, our society is a knowledge explosion society. Many new words appear in our life. Narrow vocabulary must hinder our normal reading progress. British linguists wells said: if there is no pronunciation and grammar, it still can convey a little information; if there is no vocabulary, it can convey nothing. Word formation is an effective way to accumulate vocabulary. According to estimation, there are ten million to twelve million English vocabularies, but most of them are composed by word formation. Word formation methods include derived synthesis and transformation. Students should master the commonly used meaning and the usage of the prefix, the suffix according to these, students would guess their derivation, so as to achieve the purpose of enlarge vocabulary. Such as the prefix supper means more than, pass, over, through it we can guess the supermarket, super natural, superman, superstar. Students should master English vocabulary of constructing method, familiar with the basic meaning of the root, the prefix, the suffix. It benefit for students to identify the meaning expend vocabulary and improve their reading speed. Therefore, the study, we should pay attention to peacetime accumulation and careful analysis, grasp the basic laws.For example: they confound deregulation of pleasure term campaigns to drill gas price increase havent been too bad encourage industry drum de regulation of pleasure term campaigns to drill gas price increases havent been too bad encourage industry drum new wells. In this sentence, deregulation is a new word, but the root regulation” means rule, control, the prefix de means negative, demolition, depart, remove, so you can guess deregulation mean abolish rules or controls. Also, words are constantly being redefined. Each word takes additional meanings as time passes until it has many meanings. It has been proved that the readers with the small store of vocabulary will find it very difficult in reading comprehension. How to solve this problem? According to the study of hatch and brown, learners strategies for learning vocabulary fall into five essential steps:1) having sources for encountering new words; 2) getting the forms of the new words; 3) learning the meanings of the words; 4) making a strong memory of the words; 5) using the words.B. Strengthen Grammar.A Context Free Grammar expressing dependency constraints as production rules can be constructed, where a non-terminal is given by subdividing a syntactic category with the concept of the head word of the phrase derived from the syntactic category. But to describe dependency constraints in detail causes an explosion of the number of production rules, which makes it difficult to collect all production rules expressing dependency constraints. This paragraph proposes how to strengthen a Context Free Grammar expressing dependency constraints. The main idea is to take a super ordinate-subordinate relation in the grammar as a production rule which rewrites a sub-concept into its super-concept, so that, also with a sentence including a dependency constraint which has not been collected, its syntactic tree can be given using the existed production rule expressing the semantically similar dependency constraint.Language is composed of words and grammatical structures. The accurate rate of comprehension is based on the mastering degree of the words and grammar. Since we know grammar is so important that college students must have the stable grammar knowledge. For college students, grammar knowledge can be strengthened from two aspects: fixed sentence patterns and fixed phrases. And the most effective way to have a good learn about them is to recite passages and good articles. Through this way, students would learn some new words and fixed phrases, which used frequently in English learning. For example, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill has an article named Mans Guide. In this article, there is a paragraph: man in the moment of his history has emerged in greater supremacy over the force of nature than has ever been dreamed of before. There lies before him, i he wishes, a golden age of peace and progress. He has only to conquer his last and worst enemy-himself. Once students have good memory about it, they can learn the following phrases: in this moment, emerge in, over than, dream of, the age of.C. Accumulate Cultural Background KnowledgeIf we couldnt be acquainted with these differences, we would not write a standard English composition. From what had been said, it is clear that cultural background knowledge is necessary in language teaching. Teachers should help students to solve the difficulties in language as well as in culture. For a long time, people have been working on how the cultural element affects English learning. A proportion of foreign material and authentic material should be used, especially dialogues, because its more authentic and reflects cultural behavior concerning social factors. Next, students should read extensively, including novels, magazines, and newspapers etc and read some mat