Causes and Remedies of Chinglish in College Students WritingWord格式.docx

1、Causes and Remedies of Chinglish in College Students Writing# Causes and Remedies of Chinglish in College Students Writing# Sep. 2006, Volume 3, No.9 （Serial No.33）Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072, USACauses and Remedies of Chinglish in College Students WritingPing Wang* Wuhan University Abst

2、ract:# Based on the English-Chinese contrastive analysis of some famous linguists, this paper employs lots of examples to illustrate the causes and remedies of Chinglish in the writing of college students. The causes come mainly from syntactical incompetence, inadequate exposure to authentic English

3、 and students adherence to the Chinese thinking mode. The most essential ways to reduce Chinglish are to build students awareness of the distinction between the two languages, to increase the exposure to authentic English and practice writing more often so as to adjust students Chinese thinking mode

4、 to that of English. Key words:# Chinglish causes remedies college English writing1. IntroductionDue to the tremendous differences in various aspects between English and Chinese, and Chinese students dependence upon Chinese when learning to write in English, Chinglish frequently appears in students

5、writing. Joan Pinkham describes Chinglish as “English with Chinese characteristics”, which is a kind of misshapen, hybrid language that is neither English nor Chinese. Many researches concerning the nature and sources of Chinglish have been done in the light of interlanguage theory, contrastive anal

6、ysis, error analysis, and language transfer theory. This paper attempts to discuss the causes of Chinglish, and recommend remedies to it by employing a contrastive analysis perspective.2. Causes and RemediesChinglish is not idiomatic English but “speech or writing that shows the interference and inf

7、luence of Chinese” （Deng Yanchang, 1983）. From the point of departure of the influence of Chinese language, a comparative analysis between Chinese and English is quite necessary to throw light on the causes and remedies of Chinglish. 2.1 Contrastive analysis between English and Chinese What are the

8、characteristics of English and Chinese languages?# Some famous linguists have done much contrastive study in recent decades as represented by the publication of a series of monographs, including Liu Miqings A Contrastive Study of English and Chinese and Translation（1991）, Xu Yunlongs A General Study

9、 of Contrastive Linguistics（1992）, Lian Shunengs A Contrastive Study of English and Chinese（1993） as well as several collections of papers edited by Wang Huai, Wang Fuxiang, Liu Zhongde, etc. English is a synthetic-analytic language. A synthetic language, as defined in Websters Ninth New Collegiate

10、Dictionary, is “characterized by frequent and systematic use of inflected forms to express grammatical relationships”. The inflections include gender, number, case, tense, aspect, voice, mood, degrees of comparison, person and part of speech, which play an important role in English grammar. Chinese

11、is an analytic language, as defined in Random House College Dictionary, which is “characterized by*Ping Wang（1963- ）, female, M.A., lecturer of College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University;# research field:# teaching theory and practice;# address:# No.3 Teaching Office, College of F

12、oreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, P.R.China, postcode:# 430072. 51#Causes and Remedies of Chinglish in College Students Writinga relatively frequent use of function words, auxiliary verbs, and changes in word order to express syntactic relations, rather than o

13、f inflected forms”. Accordingly, the traditional grammatical analysis is concerned with the interpretation of the semantic and pragmatic function of words and word order, especially of function words. Chinese and English differ not only in the aspect of inflection but also in the frequency of the us

14、e of function words. English relies on a large number of relative and conjunctive words and prepositions to express grammatical meanings. Function words in Chinese are not only far less in the amount but also are far less frequently used than in English. As a consequence, Chinese relies more on word

15、 order to express grammatical meaning. The distinction between English and Chinese at the formal level can be classified in the following table:#The distinction between English and Chinese at the formal level English Chinese S-V complex T1R1+T2R2+T3R3+ S-V kernel absence of kernel structure, compact

16、 composite, architecture style diffusive chronicle style hypotactic, overt cohesive ties paratactic, covert cohesion a series of sentence fragments, omission of major complete and precise in form elements （determination of the omitted elements is dependent on semantic and pragmatic references）Apart from the unawareness of the linguistic distinctions, other factors also lead to Chinglish, e.g., cultural differences, thought patterns, comprehension process and learning strategies of the st