Intra-Lingual and Inter-Lingual Errors in Chinese College Freshmen’s English Writing

In this paper, a statistical analysis was made on the errors in the freshmen’s English writing based on the English compositions collected from a Chinese 211 project university. The analytical result showed that there are mainly 13 types of errors in the English writing of China’s college freshmen, which can be categorized into “intra-lingual errors” and “inter-lingual errors”, and each of these two categories can be subdivided into “lexical errors” and “syntax errors”. Among them, the sentence inconsistency, errors in the articles, parts of speech errors or tense/voice errors take up the highest proportions. At the end, the inspirations from research results were introduced for English writing teaching

The dynamics of syntax acquisition: facilitation between syntactic structures

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers learning Hebrew as their first language. We use regression analysis, a method that has not been used to study this phenomenon. We find that the proportion of errors among the earliest produced clauses in a structure is related to the degree of acceleration of that structure's learning curve; that with the accretion of structures the proportion of errors among the first clauses of new structures declines, as does the acceleration of their learning curves. We interpret our findings as showing that learning new syntactic structures is made easier, or facilitated, by previously acquired ones

A Comparative Study of L1 Norwegian and L1 Chinese Learners’ Acquisition of L2 English Subject-verb Agreement and Word Order

Nowadays, English has been widely used by L2 language learners. With respect to L1 Chinese and L1Norwegian speakers in the process of English learning, both groups are prone to a range of errors, especially in subject-verb agreement and word order. This thesis aims at exploring the L1 Chinese and L1Norwegian English learning difficulties in subject-verb agreement and word order and makes a comparison between the two groups. The study also further seeks to investigate whether morphology or syntax is more difficult for L2 English learners and examines the influence of other intra- and extralinguistic factors (proficiency, gender, chronological age, etc.) on their grammaticality judgments. The empirical data were collected with the help of an online survey tool, JATOS. The results of the statistical analysis revealed that both L1 Norwegian and L1 Chinese patterns similarly and perform significantly less accurately on the subject-verb agreement (morphology) than word order (syntax). In terms of word order performance, the results reveal that L1 Norwegian and L1 Chinese differ significantly, it also shows that L1 Chinese individuals had more difficulty learning word order than L1 Norwegian participants. However, in terms of morphology (subject-verb agreement) and syntax (word order), the result is not confident enough to state morphology is harder than syntax due to limited data. Based on previous research and the bottleneck hypothesis, this thesis lends a tentative propensity to support syntax before morphology. Finally, it is found that both, the native language and L2 English proficiency influence the participants’ performance, while such factors as age, gender, and the length of studying English do not