MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY
AN INVESTIGATION OF COMMON WRITTEN ERRORS IN ENGLISH COMPOSITIONS MADE BY VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AT THE NATIONAL COLLEGE OF EDUCATION HCM CTITY UNDER THE
INFLUENCE OF NATIVE LANGUAGE TRANSFER
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS (TESOL) TRUGNG O41 HOC MO TP.HCM THU VIEN
Submitted by NGUYEN NGOC THUY Supervisor: Dr LE HOANG DUNG
Ho Chi Minh city, October 2011
Trang 2ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates the language transfer errors in the written
compositions of the students at National College of Education-HCM city The purpose is to find out the degree of the influence of mother tongue on their writing
and the change of the extent of errors when writing compositions with different
complexity and length
For this purpose, twenty students were asked to take part in the present research by means of writing a composition and taking an interview after the completion of the written work Twenty pieces of English compositions written on different topics were collected, identified, analyzed and explained with a focus on
various categories of cross-linguistic errors By the use of error analysis method and contrastive analysis the interlingual errors and error sources have been
scrutinized The most typical Vietnamese interference errors in using English are also described in detail, and the most significant differences between English and the Vietnamese languages are listed
The findings of this research can be summarized as follows There is a
strong influence of the native language on the written abilities of the students learning English as a second language, and the influence becomes greater when the students have to deal with longer and more complicated compositions It was also found the highest ranking transfer errors of the students in terms of frequency were verb, noun, preposition, expression and determiner
Suggestions for English language learning at National College of
Education—HCM city have also been given in this thesis
Trang 3TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page Acknowledgment (ii)
Abstract | (iit)
Table of contents (iv)
List of tables (vii)
List of figures (ix)
List of abbreviations (x)
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Background of the study ¬ = 1 1.2 Purpose ofthe Study .- HH nh nh 3 1.3 The scope of this sfudy - cu nh na 4 1.4 Organization of the theSIS HQ HH kh, 4
Chapter 2 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 6
2.1 Overview Of CYTOLS 20 cece cece eee seen renee ene eee ene t nese nese nent ees 6 2.2 Classification Of €rTOTS nh 9 2.3 Theory of language transÍ€r con ven 15
2.3.1 BehaviorIst theOrY con HH nh ky hy 16 2.3.2 Contrastive theory c2 HH» kh ven 17
Trang 42.5.1.4 Morphological change of verbs cccssece cece ene e ener eee ees 2.5.1.5 Misuse of parts of speech -. ch 2.5.2 Syntactical transfÍer -.-. -«ss⁄ HH Le eeeeaee 2.5.2.1 Misuse of articles cece eee eee eee nee eens eee eees Nghi
2.5.2.2 Omission of the auxiliary verb “5e ”” cày 2.5.2.3 Wrong Word order nh
2.5.3 Lexical trafISÍ€T cọ HS HH HH nh nh kg 2.5.3.1 Misuse of collocaflOns chen 2.5.3.2 Misuse Of prepOSItIOPS co HQ nh hen
2.5.3.3 Confusion between “/here be” and “havể”
2.5.3.4 Tautologous expressions in making complex sentences
2.5.3.5 Lack of subject pronouns or obJect pronouns
VN? co tớai
2.7 Conceptual framework .ccccceeecceeeeeeseeeseeeesseeeeseeeneees Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY 3.1 Research method . c HH HH SE kh nhe, 3.2 Method of data analysis ‹ -
3.3 Participants 2.2.0 0 cece cece cence eee ence ence tee nee eee eeene een eneeeneeess 3.4 Data and source Of đafa c co cằ cà Chapter 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 54 4.1 Analysis Of afa LH HH HH HH HH ng nu 4.1.1 Analysis of overall errors in terms of the causes of errors
4.1.2 Analysis of overall errors in terms of the core parts of speech
4.2 Research question Ì_ cu,
54
Trang 6Table 2 1 Table 2.2: Table 2.3: Table 2.4: Table 2.5: Table 2.6: Table 2.7: Table 2.8: Table 2.9: LIST OF TABLES
: Summary table of the used set of error categories Examples of interference errors in morphological
pluralization Of nouns . -« «se Examples of interference errors in morphological
change Of adj€CfIV€S_ nen Examples of interference errors in morphological
change of personal pronouns _ - Examples of interference errors in morphological
Change Of VerDs .c cece eee ee eect eee ee eens ete e eee e nee ee eee nn eee Examples of interference errors in the misuse of
parts Of SDeech HH HH nà nh nh nh
Examples of interference errors in the misuse of articles
Examples of interference errors in the misuse of
the auxiliary verb “Để ”” HH khu nh sen Examples of interference errors in the sequence of words Table 2.10: Examples of interference errors in determining
the positlon Of adJ€CfIV€S cuc nhe Table 2.11: Examples of interference errors in determining
0039930010200 023 In ằằ-< - Table 2.12: Examples of interference errors in word order
in structures containing units of measurement
Table 2.13: Examples of interference errors in the misuse
Table 2.14: Examples of interference errors in the misuse of prepositions Of collOCcatiOns_ - con
Table 2.15: Examples of interference errors in the confusion
Trang 7Table 2.16: Examples of interference errors in tautologous expressions 39
Table 2.17: Examples of interference errors in the lack of pronouns in making complex sentences kh ky eae 40 Table 2.18: Summary table of types of writing errors caused by the Table 3.1: Table 3.2: Table 3.3: Table 3.4: Table 3.5: Table 4.1: Table 4.2: Table 4.3: Table 4.4: Table 4.5: Table 4.6: Table 4.7: influence of mother tongue .- - 41
The topics of composition used for study_ 50
Errors made and explained by students GI in the interview 87
Errors made and explained by students GII in the interview 92
Classification of the errors made by students GI 103
Classification of the errors made by students GII 109
Statistical table about errors "¬ 53 Overall errors made by both groups of students in terms o£the causes OŸ eTTOFS 55
Errors made by the students of both groups in terms of the core parts of speech - 56
Overall errors made by both groups of students in terms o£the core parts Of speech - 57
Overall interlingual errors made by the students_ 59
Errors occurring due to cross-linguistic influence in the GI and GII students” compositlons_ 121
Overall interlingual error and interlingual error rate
Trang 8LIST OF FIGURES
Fig 2.1: Conceptual framework of the research_ - 46
Fig 4.1 :Percentage of error Caf€BOTI€S c c2 56
Fig 4.2: Overall errors made by the students in a particular category 59 Fig 4.3: Proportion of interlingual errors to intralingual errors
made by the studenfs_ Sàn 61
Fig 4.4: Relative frequency of interlingual error cafۯOrles 63 Fig 4.5: Interlingual error rate made by the students GI and GIL 66
Trang 9LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS LI - the first language
L2 — the second language
EFL — English as foreign language ‘SLA — second language acquisition CA — contrastive analysis CAH — contrastive analysis hypothesis EA — error analysis REF — reference St — student
Trang 10Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
The influence of one’s native language on second language acquisition has been widely studied by various researchers in the world With respect to this issue, Edge (1989:7) assumed that when people do not know how to say something in a foreign language, one possibility is to use words and structures from their own language and try to make them fit into the foreign language In other words, the learners use their previous mother-tongue experiences as a means of organizing the
second language data Sharing the same opinion, Brown (1994:105) said that in early
stages of learning a second language, before the system of the second language is familiar, the native language is the only linguistic system in previous experience upon which the learner can draw In addition, transfer errors are found to be more frequent with beginners than with intermediate students because the beginners have less previous second language knowledge to draw upon in making hypotheses about rules and might therefore be expected to make correspondingly more use of their first language knowledge (Taylor, 1975, cited by Ellis, 1994:62)
In Vietnam the demand for English for the purpose of communicating with the outside world and accessing advanced science and technology has greatly been increased in the recent years English has been taught in the secondary school
curriculum as a compulsory school subject At the tertiary level, English for special
purposes has been taught in the training program However, Vietnamese students’ exposure to the foreign language is in general confined to a few hours per week of formal classroom instruction, and the use of Vietnamese in the process of teaching
Trang 11situations, the influence of the Vietnamese mother tongue is inevitable In fact, this
influence has been investigated by a number of Vietnamese educators and researchers
In an article in the monthly magazine “Language and Life”, Pham (2004) indicated that
it was the similarities and differences between the structures of English and Vietnamese languages that exerted both positive and negative influence on the process of learning English of Vietnamese students when she studied the word order in English
and Vietnamese verb structures Nguyen (1995, cited by Mahendran, 2010:67)
conducted a case study to demonstrate first language transfer in Vietnamese learners of
English He examined a particular language form, namely oral competence in English
past tense making He tried to determine the role of L1 transfer in the acquisition of this English linguistic feature as a function of age, time of exposure to English, and place and purpose of learning English In his work “The investigation and comparison of languages” Le (2004) compared the similarities and dissimilarities between English
and Vietnamese sentence structures, and pointed out that Vietnamese learners’
problems are deep-rooted in differences between English and Vietnamese language, causing obstacles to Vietnamese learners Dam (2001) presented a paper at the annual
conference of National Association for Bilingual Education, Arizona, in which he analyzed a number of persistent types of interference errors found in English written by Vietnamese learners, whereby he claimed that the mother-tongue influence is
undeniable He also stated that these errors appeared to occur when the structures of Vietnamese and English are strikingly different
In general, not much work in this field has been done in Vietnam to date, most of the work being performed by overseas authors (Le, 2006) Moreover, these
researches could not cover all the written errors that students usually make in details More studies need to be conducted to evaluate the effects of native language exerted on Vietnamese learners of English As a teacher of English at the National College of
Trang 12to deal with a wide range of different error types made by her students It has been found that it looks very much as if her students, who have a low English proficiency
level, are very often resorting to their knowledge of the structure of Vietnamese when
they do not know how to express an idea in English A better understanding of the L1 influence in the process of EFL writing is needed to help teachers understand students’ difficulties in learning English and find out appropriate teaching strategies or methods to help students learn English more effectively For this reason, the author of the present study decides to continue doing research on this issue to have a deeper insight into the influence of language transfer on common writing errors made by the students at the College of Education-HCM city with the hope that this research can help the teachers find ways to deal with learners’ transfer errors more comprehensively
1.2 Purpose of the study
The purpose of this study is to investigate into the influence of mother tongue
on the types of writing errors made by the college students, and basing on the results
obtained from the research, some suggestions would be proposed so that they can serve as practical implications for teachers to improve the teaching and for students to deal
with language transfer errors Firstly, it aims to study a number of written English
errors made by the Vietnamese students at a college under the influence of native language transfer as well as to find out some possible causes of the students’ error- making Secondly, it aims to determine how the language transfer errors vary according to the length and complexity of the writing compositions
Trang 13(1) What kinds of errors do Vietnamese students at The National College of
Education—HCM city encounter in their English writing under the influence of
native language transfer?
(2) In what way is the amount of negative language transfer related to the
length and complexity of the compositions?
1.3 The scope of this study
The present study will not take up all items involved in the issue of language
transfer because it is just going to analyze the students’ errors The research scope of this thesis is limited to the analysis of just the students’ writing compositions in the language classroom at a college, with a focus on lexical, morphological, syntactical and spelling written errors at the word or phrase levels Phonological errors are not taken
into account because they are very difficult to identify in written texts In addition,
although the transfer of knowledge can either enhance (positive transfer) or inhibit (negative transfer) the correct acquisition of the second language in varying degrees (Gass & Selinker, 2001:72), the research is confined to the investigation of the negative influence of mother tongue because it is the negative influence that causes errors commonly made in writing compositions by the students having low English proficiency level
1.4 Organization of the thesis
This thesis is composed of five chapters as follows: First, chapter 1 deals with the background to the present study, including a brief description of the problem of language transfer among Vietnamese students and the research questions guiding this study The purpose of study, the scope of study and the organization of the thesis are
also presented in this chapter Next, chapter 2 consists of a literature review to situate
Trang 14transfer, negative language transfer by Vietnamese students, theory of errors and error analysis, and some other issues concerning this research Then, chapter 3 presents a detailed plan to collect adequate and reliable data for analysis including the selection of
subjects, research instruments, procedures of data collection and data analysis After that, chapter 4 describes the results from the study Some discussions about these
Trang 15Chapter Two REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Chapter two, the review of literature, relates the current study to the larger
context of previous researches on language transfer in L2 acquisition It presents
different definitions and approaches linguists took towards errors as well as the ways of classifying errors by several scholars It also examines how learners’ mother tongue affects the study of a foreign language In addition, in this chapter a number of
examples of interference errors made by non-native learners, and specially, some
persistent types of interference errors made in English by Vietnamese students are given In the end, it discusses various approaches towards the study of error and in particular, the error analysis method used in the present thesis
2.1 Overview of errors
Errors are considered crucial to the language learning process as they inform us about some of the hypotheses that learners are formulating (Schachter, 1991:89), They contain valuable information on strategies that learners use to acquire language
and can play an important role in the study of foreign languages (Selinker, 1992:150) In addition, it is noticeable that errors can provide “important evidence for the strength
and weakness of a particular native language influence” (Odlin 1989:23) In Corder’s
(1974, cited by Xu, 2008:37) seminal paper “The significance of learners’ errors”, he
stated that errors are significant in three aspects: 1) they tell the teacher what needs to be taught; 2) they tell the researcher how learning proceeds; and 3) they are a means whereby learners test their hypotheses about the L2.” Therefore, in order to understand what errors and how Vietnamese EFL students tend to make, a systematic analysis of
Trang 16Linguistic experts have proposed various definitions of error Errors are even viewed differently at different periods A classical definition was given by Corder
(1981, cited by Awasthi, 1995:40) considered “error” as the “breach of code”, that is,
they are the signs of an imperfect knowledge of the code, for the learners have not yet internalized the formation rules of the foreign languages Burt et al (1982:139) refer to “error” as a systematic deviation from a selected norm or set of norms In the Vietnamese education system, the selected norms are mainly standard British English and standard American English Lennon (1991:182) defined an error as “a linguistic form or combination of forms which in the same context and under similar conditions of production would, in all likelihood, not be produced by the native speaker counterparts” Rod Ellis (1997:17) says that errors reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge; they occur because the learner does not know what is correct
There are some other terms which may be confused with “error”, especially
the term “mistake” Commonly, mistake and error have been understood as
synonymous, but in language analysis, they have different implications Corder (1981, cited by Ananda Shrestha, 1989:2) says “it will be useful to refer to errors of
performance as “mistakes” which is not significant to the language learning process,
Trang 17stage the learner does something wrong without knowing it, in the second stage he/she
does not know how to put it right though he/she may know he/she is doing it wrong,
whereas in the last stage he/she can correct his/her wrong version For him/her, errors
occur in the first two stages while mistakes belong to the last stage
Briefly, there are various ways of defining an error based on different
perspectives Each way has its own reasonable aspects and certain contributions to language teaching and learning In this thesis, Burt’s definition is preferred and taken as the basis to define a written error because it proves to be the most comprehensive
and closely related to the students’ commonly made errors, which is relevant to the
purpose of the thesis
With respect to the attitudes towards the errors, a difference in them can be found In fact, there are two learning theories that hold different opinions on the subject of language errors in the course of learning One such theory is the behaviorist theory which denies that errors have any positive contribution to make to the learning
of a skill such as language, and they occur as a result of mother tongue interference, or
negative transfer from the learner’s first language pattern (Lado, 1957, as cited by
Isurin, 2005:1) Behaviorists suppose that errors are the evidence of wrong association
between stimulus and response, and are signs of failure, of ineffective teaching or lack of control They also believe that it is very difficult to eradicate wrong forms Therefore, they maintain that errors must be eradicated by tightly controlling what the learner is allowed to produce According to them, an error will result in a bad habit if it
is tolerated instead of it being corrected Brooks (1960, cited by Jensen, 2002:53) writes: “Like sin, error is to be avoided” In order to predict potential errors, contrastive
Trang 18The view contradictory to behaviorism is the mentalism Mentalists believe ‘that an error is the evidence of the process of hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing All learners must proceed forward through this process Nobody can claim to be perfect in a language (Corder, 1981, cited by Luitel, 1999:38) Therefore, students are advised not to worry too much about errors, because errors are regarded as
inevitable in the learning The students learn by making errors and having them corrected On the other hand, teachers should be prepared to help them to sort things
out for themselves In other words, teachers should not be too hasty in rejecting a controlled amount of grammatical terminology and mother-tongue explanation process
(Brumfit, 1984:65)
The two theories seem to be different The behaviorist attitude is too mechanistic For them errors are considered intolerable and should be entirely
corrected or avoided In the other theory the mentalist attitude towards errors is too strict They regard the making of errors as the milestones of learners’ progress In
language learning and teaching, teachers have to face and make the learners face both kinds of situation According to Biao (1996:4) a balanced approach towards control and freedom can be the right attitude for teachers In controlled situation, for example, grammatical study, drilling and vocabulary study, the learner is under the control of a
given task, which demands strict error correction On the contrary, in the situation of using language freely, for example in free conversation, essay writing, etc freedom of
expression should be given
2.2 Classification of errors
Trang 19The classification of errors greatly depends on the different purposes of studying errors and various criteria for categorizing errors Therefore, it is infeasible to
reach a common classification of errors Even for the same author, his way of classifying errors can change over time Some typical and common ways of classifying
errors of some well-known authors are mentioned below
Corder (1981, cited by Awasthi, 1995:43) refers to three types of errors, namely, transfer errors, analogical errors and teaching-induced errors He also makes a distinction between overt and covert errors “An overt error is easy to identify, because there is a clear deviation in form A covert error occurs in utterances that are
superficially well formed but which do not mean what the learner intended them to mean.”
According to Richards (1974, cited in Krushna, 2007:41) there are two kinds of errors The first one which student learners of the L2 make in speaking English is
intralingual errors which reflect “the general characteristics of rule learning” such as
incomplete application of rules The second type is developmental errors, which refer to errors caused by “learners attempting to build up hypotheses about English”
However, Richards’ way of classifying errors changed over time Richards et al
(1992:205), basing on the causes of errors, divided errors into two types: interlingual and intralingual errors Interlingual errors are interference that happens when “an item or structure in the L2 manifests some degree of difference from, and some degree of similarity with the equivalent item or structure in the learner’s L1” (Jackson, 1987:101), that is to say, the errors which are caused by the learners’ native language
For example, Vietnamese students may say that “Yesterday, I see an old friend” In this sentence, they forget to put the verb “see” in the past tense It is easy to understand
Trang 20last month, two years ago, etc.”, which is enough to describe the past tense On the
contrary, intralingual errors are those due to the language being learned, independent of
the native language According to Richards (1974, cited by Farzaneh, 2007:2) they are “items produced by the learner which reflect not the structure of the mother tongue, but generalizations based on partial exposure to the target language The learner, in this
case, tries to “derive the rules behind the data to which he/she has been exposed, and
may develop hypotheses that correspond neither to the mother tongue nor to the target
language” (Richards, 1974, cited by Farzaneh, 2007:6) Besides, intralingual errors are
further divided into some subtypes: errors of overgeneralization, errors of
simplification, developmental errors, communication-based errors, induced errors, errors of avoidance, and errors of overproduction (Jack C Richards, John Platt and
Heidi Platt, 1992:212)
Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982:50) have different ways of classifying the types of errors For them there are four main types of errors including omission, addition, misformation and misordering To be more specific, they point out the definition of each type of error as follows:
1 Omission: the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance (e.g in early stages of learning, the omission of function words
rather than content words)
2 Addition: the presence of an item that must not appear in well-formed utterances (e.g failure to delete certain items: He doesn’t knows me.)
3 Misformation: the use of wrong form of the morpheme or structure
(sometimes called misselection)
4 Misordering: the incorrect placement of a morpheme or group of
morphemes in an utterance (e.g The misplacement of adverbials,
interrogatives and adjectives) (cited in Ellis, 1995)
Trang 21James (1998:175) distinguishes four categories of errors:
1 When the required target language item is unknown and the learner borrows
L1 substitute, as a result, they can make a mother tongue transfer error
2 Intralingual errors: Errors include false analogy (e.g boy and boys vs child
and childs), misanalysis, incomplete rule application (under generalization),
exploiting redundancy, overlooking co-occurrence restrictions, hypercorrection and overgeneralization
3 Communication-strategy errors: Errors include the use of holistic strategies (e.g Students do not find the required form, so they try to use another near- equivalent L2 item which they have learnt) and analytic strategies (expressing the concept indirectly, by allusion rather than by direct reference, also called
circumlocution)
4 Induced errors: Errors “result more from the classroom situation than from
either the student’s incomplete competence in English grammar (intralingual
errors) or L1 interference (interlingual errors) (Stenson, 1983:256):
a Material induced errors b Teacher-talk induced errors
c Exercise-based induced errors
d Errors induced by pedagogical priorities e Look-up errors
In conclusion, there are many different ways to classify the errors students of
L2 make They all help to distinguish to a certain extent between writing errors originating in a student’s L1 and the target language itself It is clear that from the
Trang 22because it covers the causes of errors of other linguistic experts More important is the thing that it deals with interlingual errors and intralingual errors, which is the purpose of study of this thesis Therefore, the author of the present study chooses James’
classification of errors and also bases on the traditional grammar Besides, because the
present study addresses mainly the negative transfer errors in writing, little attention is paid to the subdivisions of the intralingual errors, while more attention is given to the syntactical, lexical and morphological interlingual errors
To sum up, in this thesis the errors are explained in grammatical terms, and examined to find their sources The used scheme of error classification includes 10 gross error categories that the students frequently make in writing They are chosen to correspond closely to those found in syllabi and language textbooks (Le, 2006), and
include the core elements of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun,
conjunction and connector, preposition, determiner (articles, possessive adjective, demonstrative adjective, etc.), expression/idiom and word order Each category itself is subdivided into omission/missing, addition/superfluous and substitution/wrong (misformation, choice error, wrong spelling, non-conformity to grammatical rules) After setting the categories of errors, the error sources to be studied are considered in order to find out whether they are mainly interlingual or intralingual, based on the
literature (Cathy, 2002; Andersen, 1979; Le, 2006; etc.) This is a critical stage in error
analysis because it attempts to identify the cause of the errors Below is the table summarizing the used set of error categories
Table 2 1: Summary table of the used set of error categories
ERROR
CATEGORIES ERROR SUBCATEGORIES
omission of plural marker noun superfluous noun
wrong use of noun
Trang 23
omission of verb (missing predicate) addition of verb (superfluous predicate)
verb wrong use of verb (verb misformation, wrong infinitive form
errors, -ed/-t forms, -ing forms, verb choice error, passive voice
error, verb tense error, aspect error, agreement error, .) adjective wrong use of adjective
wrong use of adverb adverb misformed adverb
omission of pronoun pronoun addition of pronoun
wrong use of pronoun, misformed pronoun
omission of connector
conjunction/ addition of connector " connector wrong use of connector
omission of preposition
preposition superfluous preposition
wrong preposition omission of determiner
determiner superfluous determiner
wrong determiner; misformed determiner
¬ wrong expression (whole expression errors, ungrammatical expression/idiom expression, awkward/ambiguous expression)
word order wrong word order spelling wrong spelling
In order to explain and identify the cause of the errors, after having an overview of errors and different ways of classifying errors, we come to studying various theories of the transfer of patterns from the native language, which is undoubtedly one of the major sources of errors in language learning (Lightbown & Spada, 1999:165)
2.3 Theories concerning language transfer
The issue of first language transfer in L2 acquisition has been a field of
Trang 24the role of first language and its effects on the process of learning a second language ‘Odlin (1993:27) defined language transfer as “the influence resulting from similarities ‘and differences between the target language and any other language that has been »previously acquired” Spratt et al (2005:44) indicate that “transfer is an influence from the learner's first language on the second language” Wilkins (1972, cited by Mohideen -1996:1) observes: “When learning a foreign language an individual already knows his
mother tongue, and it is this which he attempts to transfer The transfer may prove to
be justified because the structure of the two languages is similar- in that case we get “positive transfer” or “facilitation”- or it may prove unjustified because the structure of
the two languages are different- in that case we get “negative transfer’— or “interference” Sharing the same opinion, Richards et al (1992:205) state that one of
the factors influencing the learning process is first language interference or negative
transfer, which may be defined as “the use of a negative language pattern or rule which
leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language” Dulay, Burt and
Krashen (1982, cited by Bhela, 1999:22) define interference “as the automatic transfer,
due to habit, of the surface structure of the first language onto the surface of the target
language” In addition, Lott (1983:256) defines interference as “errors in the learner’s
use of the foreign language that can be traced back to the mother tongue” In line with this Ellis (1997:51) also refers to interference as “transfer”, which he defines as being “the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2”
In spite of various ways of expression, the researchers all concur that language transfer refers to the influence that the learner’s first language exerts over the learning of an second language In this thesis, attention is mainly paid to the negative transfer of Vietnamese language in students’ writings, which is of great concern among
teachers and researchers working on L2 acquisition Positive transfer will not be discussed in detail since the topic of this study focuses mainly on error analysis
Trang 252.3.1 Behaviorist theory i
| By the end of the 1960’s, a learning theory called behaviorist theory put “forward the idea that old habits got in the way of learning new habits This -phenomenon is known as “interference” Interference has been one of the focal points in behaviorist accounts of L2 acquisition Behaviorists state that the process underlying all learning is habit formation Thus, language development is described as the acquisition of habits The behaviorists regard language learning as the acquisition of skills (Littlewood, 1984:17) This complex skill, as explained in Hubbard et al (1983:168), is broken down into a series of habits, which are drilled until they become automatic and unthinking, and the habits are taught in a series of small steps, so as to avoid errors Because the language development is described as a process of receiving
a series of habits, it is assumed that learners begin to learn L2 by those habits of
learning their L1 Some old habits will be helpful to the new process of acquisition while some other habits hamper the habits needed for the process of forming speech when learning L2 Besides, Norrish (1983:29) once stated that if language is essentially
aset of habits, then when we try to learn new habits, the old ones will interfere with the new ones Therefore, mother tongue interference has been regarded as one of the major
causes of writing errors made by most of L2 learners Abbort and Wingard (1981:28) assumed: “wherever the structure of L1 and the target language differed, there would be problems in learning and difficulties in performance, and that the greater the differences were, the greater the difficulties would be” Lee (1968, in Ellis 1985:23) even believed that the interference coming from the learner’s native language was the prime cause, or even the sole cause of difficulty and error in foreign language learning
In sum, within the behaviorist framework, which attributes the function of
language to instruction and experience, language transfer is seen as a direct result of the influence imposed by L1 structures on corresponding structures in L2 (Lado, 1957, in Ellis 1994:306), and errors are regarded as evidence of language transfer
Trang 262.3.2 Contrastive theory
Closely related to the behaviorist theory is the contrastive analysis hypothesis Contrastive analysis is an inductive investigative approach defined as a systematic comparison of specific linguistic characteristics of two or more languages in order to determine both the differences and similarities between them (Els et al., 1984:38) It is used as an essential tool to compare or contrast the mother tongue and the target language of a learner and to determine to what extent errors are due to mother tongue interference Although Contrastive Analysis itself is a hypothesis, it is based on a number of assumptions (Hamers, 1995:224) The main assumptions that have often been discussed are:
1 The main difficulties while learning a second language are primarily caused by mother tongue interference
2 These difficulties are predicted by CA after accomplishing a comparison between a source language and target language
3 In order to overcome these difficulties, teaching learning materials are prepared Such materials help to reduce the effects of interference
Trang 27‘learner's L2 with his L1, he assumed: “Individuals tend to transfer the forms and ‘meanings and the distribution of forms and meanings for their native language and
‘culture to the foreign language and culture.” To this end Ellis (1985:20) further
Trang 28ARETE SS, TEE vacceptable in the target language because of a specific reason (Norrish, 1983:29) In a reg eats OND
‘word, CA is a result of the need to teach a L2 in the most efficient way Its ultimate
‘aim is to compare morphological systems, syntactical and lexical meanings of two or
‘more languages For this reason, it is used in this study to analyze the students’ writing
‘errors and predict the interference between Vietnamese language and English language However, this approach gives an incomplete presentation of L2 acquisition process It overemphasizes the interference of the outer environment of language study while the language learners themselves are totally neglected In addition, the fact shows that most of the learners’ errors are not predictable on the basis of contrastive
analysis Some types of errors which show a striking resemblance to errors made by
children while acquiring L1, could not be accounted for by contrastive analysis Tran (1991:78) pointed out three criticisms of Contrastive Analysis: Firstly, it only emphasized the differences between the native language and target language; it takes no account of other factors affecting learner performance Secondly, it is unable to predict errors caused by interference from the target language materials learned
previously Thirdly, learning strategies, such as overgeneralization and hypercorrection, are overlooked by Contrastive Analysis; it can only predict errors
resulting from structural differences between the native language and target language To sum up, contrastive analysis hypothesis has been used by some researchers as a powerful device to examine errors caused by L1 interference It helps to look into the similarities and differences between languages, thus explains and predicts problems in second language learning However, it has faced criticisms, mostly on its predictive power Anyway, it does not mean it is of no importance If carefully revised and extended, it can serve as a good tool for linguistic research Ellis (1997:52) suggests that contrastive analysis should be combined with another type of analysis, namely
error analysis, to determine what the underlying causes of a L2 learner’s errors are In
Trang 29‘the present study Contrastive Analysis is also regarded an important tool in understanding language transfer in second language learning.-A detailed comparison of the native language, i.e., Vietnamese and the target language, i.e., English is made in section 2.5 to draw conclusions about the process of language transfer specific to the English interlanguage of the Vietnamese students
2.3.3 Cognitive theory
In addition to the above approaches, a cognitive approach to language transfer has prevailed in the field of L2 acquisition over the last decades Cognitive theory is a learning theory of psychology that attempts to explain human behavior by
understanding the thought processes It sees L2 acquisition as a conscious and reasoned
Trang 30However, there have been only a few empirical studies about this approach so far Although we know that the processes of automatizing and restructuring are central to the approach, it is still not clear what kinds of structures will be automatized through ‘practice and what will be restructured (Croft, 2004:46) Also it cannot predict which L1 ‘structures will be transferred, which will not, and cannot explain complicated linguistic issues concerning the process of L2 acquisition
In conclusion, the above-mentioned theories have different strengths and can complement each other While the behaviorist approach is more practical in the first stage of learning a second language, the contrastive theory helps explain and predict errors due to negative language transfer, and the cognitive approach appears well suited
for investigating errors in the more advanced stages With this understanding, the
negative influence of language transfer is considered in the following sections
2.4 The negative influence of language transfer on non-native speakers
Language Transfer has long been a controversial issue Some studies found that L1 transfer did occur in L2 learning, whereas others showed that L1 had no effects on L2 learning at all However, many recent studies support the view that cross- linguistic influences can impact second-language acquisition A lot of empirical evidence indicates the L1 transfer from phonology, and morphology, lexical, semantic and syntactic and pragmatic, etc Benson (2002:68) stated that it is now generally accepted that language transfer, or cross-linguistic influence, does occur, but is a far more complex phenomenon than hitherto believed Mahmoud (2006:29) pointed out that the data on the interlanguage and language transfer show that it is highly probable
that L2 learners will always think most often in their L1, even at the advanced level
Lado (1957, in Gass and Selinker 1983:1) even considers native language as the primary source of errors Leveston (1983:154) contend that all second language
Trang 31learners begin by assuming that for every word in their mother tongue there is a single
translation equivalent in foreign language The assumption of word-for-word translation equivalence or “thinking in the mother tongue” is the only way a learner can
begin to communicate in a second language Webster (1987:364) and his co-
researchers have reported that ““We have, however, worked on the assumption that first language interference is one major cause of student errors We find this to be self- evident as a general principle, though individual errors are often far more complex in origin.” Sharing the same opinion, Swan and Smith (1987:11), in their articles in a practical reference book with 19 language backgrounds entitled Learner English, also commented that “They are all clearly convinced that the interlanguages of the learners
they are discussing are specific and distinct so that it makes sense to talk about Thai
English, Japanese English, Greek English and so on; and they all obviously see mother- tongue influence as accounting for many of the characteristic problems they described.”
Leila Farkamekh (2006:65) maintained that a French student wishing to learn the English language is confronted with a lot of issues of language transfer, though
English and French languages have many similar points For example, while in French
the agreement of the possessive adjective is done with the noun that follows, in English it agrees with the possessor and not the noun that follows This causes French learners
to make errors Also, French students would face the obstacles created by the
difference in the use of the articles for attributive phrases
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ples from 710 Hong Kong ESL college students to investigate the relationship tween students’ mother tongue and EFL writing The findings reveal that, in all of the
ive error types investigated, most errors were closely related to the subjects’ mother
tongue The data from interviews with the students also confirm that EFL students first
‘called upon their mother tongue before producing their English writings
In a paper presented at the National Association for Bilingual Education, Dam (2001) stated that mother-tongue influence on non-native learners is undeniable He ‘explained how Spanish-speaking English language learners make errors in their -interlanguage by borrowing patterns from their mother tongue In this paper Dam cited ‘the examples illustrating these interference-induced errors from his own observations as well as those shared by bilingual education teachers enrolled in his graduate-level course in second-language acquisition during the years at Texas Woman’s University He pointed out that Spanish learners make errors in articles because in Spanish the definite article (el, la) is used with possessive pronouns, and the indefinite article (un, uno, una) is not used before nouns describing profession, occupation or social status Spanish learners have also considerable difficulty with English prepositions Another example of language transfer errors is the adverbs of frequency In Spanish, adverbs of frequency have various possible positions in the sentence, but not the typical central position as in English Similarly, Hakuta (1977:295) considered the example of a native speaker of Spanish who says “Js the house of my mother.” The Spanish equivalent would be “Es la casa de mi madre.” The English utterance contains two errors, whose sources can be clearly traced back to Spanish Spanish allows subject pronouns to be deleted When this rule is transferred to English, “This is” or “It is” simply becomes “Js.” Also, Spanish uses the possessed-possessor order; thus we have “the house of my mother” (instead of “my mother’s house’; in Spanish “la casa de mi madre’’)
Trang 33Ne SPREE peel er SRE, AEP TFC
Faghih (1997, cited by Karimnia, 2007:290) undertakes an overview of Iranian
leamers’ language transfer errors in his study with an interest in contrastive analysis
‘approach as a suitable testing ground for language transfer He revealed that the most
‘common source of error is the influence of the native language, and that in processing
English syntactic structures, native speakers adopt certain strategies similar to those of ‘first-language learners
In sum, according to many researchers, the influence of non-native languages
would occur to any learner wishing to learn a foreign language, though the degree of
influence depends on many factors, e.g language background, language area, learning
Lo
‘environment, learner level, etc
2.5 Negative language transfer by Vietnamese students
The present section focuses on the native language interference errors that are
common for EFL learners in Vietnam According to Dam (2001:1), many syntactical
structures of Vietnamese and English are strikingly different, causing Vietnamese learners to make some types of persistent errors in English; and in most cases, the negative transfer of Vietnamese sentence patterns in Vietnamese learners’ English writing reflects negative transfer of Vietnamese thought patterns In this section CA of different thought patterns in Vietnamese and English languages is applied to find out those of English language similar and different to Vietnamese sentence patterns
However, instead of overall comparison between Vietnamese and English, in this study
the researcher contrasted these two languages on the core elements of speech, including
verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, word order, etc Below are the examples of
typical Vietnamese interference errors taken from the work done on the subject of
Trang 34ET ‘process of English In these examples morphological systems, syntactical and lexical § m9 meanings of Vietnamese and English languages are compared’and explained ere RRS
2.5.1 Morphological transfer: The goal of this subsection is to list the various types 'of common interference errors in the production of English inflectional morphology by
Native Vietnamese learners
‘2.5.1.1 Morphological] pluralization of nouns:
Morphological pluralization of nouns is a notorious problem for the
‘Vietnamese students In Vietnamese the plurality of a noun phrase is encoded in the ‘preceding numerals or determiners, that is to say, in Vietnamese, nouns in the plural form remain the same or simply added “những”, “nhiều”, “cdc”, etc before the noun,
‘whereas in English, nouns in the plural form may be added an “s” or have different ‘ending, So it is likely for Vietnamese students to make errors
Table 2.2: Examples of interference errors in morphological pluralization of nouns (Le, 2006:60)
VIETNAMESE ENGLISH
Họ là những sinh viên giỏi They are good student
(instead of They are good students.)
Họ mua nhiêu đô chơi cho trẻ con ở They bought a lot of toy for children in the
trường mắm non kindergarten
(instead of They bought a_lot of toys for
children in the kindergarten.)
Ching tôi đã viếng thăm nhiéu dia danh | We have visited many beautiful place in
dep ở đất nước bạn your country
(instead of We have visited many beautiful
places in your country.)
Trang 35
2.5.1.2 Morphological change of adjectives and comparatives
Comparative and superlative forms of adjectives pose difficult problems for Vietnamese students It is because Vietnamese adjectives do not change in forming comparative or superlative and just added hon, bang, nhdt, whereas the English monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives are inflected for degree of comparison in much more complex ways, and other adjectives express the same distinction by compounding with more and most
Table 2.3: Examples of interference errors in morphological change of adjectives (Le, 2006:65)
VIETNAMESE ENGLISH
Con sông này rộng hơn con sông kia This river is large than that one
(instead of This river is larger than that one.) Chị ấy lái xe cần thận hơn chông phải | Does she drive carefully than her
không? husband?
(instead of Does she drive more carefully than her husband?)
Ngôi nhà này to băng ngôi nhà kia This house is big equal to that house
(instead of This house is as_big as that
house)
Trang 362.5.1.3 Morphological change of persons when functioning as personal pronouns in objective case, possessive adjectives or possessive pronouns
Vietnamese students have considerable difficulties in mastering the use of English personal pronouns Pronouns, the inflected parts of speech in English, have
objective case forms, such as me, her, him, us, them in addition to the nominative (7,
she, he, we, they) and possessive forms (my, his, her, our, their)
Table 2.4: Examples of interference errors in morphological change
of personal pronouns (Tran, 1993:145)
VIETNAMESE ENGLISH
Nó thông mình hơn tôi He is more intelligent than me
(instead of He is more intelligent than I )
Nó làm việc đó cho tôi He does that for I (instead of He does that for me.)
Quyên từ điền tiếng Anh này là của tôi, This English dictionary is my or This English dictionary is of I
(instead of This English dictionary is mine.)
Ong dy hién mình cho sự nghiệp cao cả
tủa dat nước
He devoted him to the noble cause of his country
(instead of He devoted himself to the noble cause of his country.)
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2.5.1.4 Morphological change of verbs in tenses, persons and numbers in ‘agreement with the subjects
Dam (2001:3) noted that tense system is a notorious problem for the Vietnamese students This can be explained by the fact that Vietnamese beginners almost have no idea about the system of English tenses of verbs Although tenses and aspects of verbs are the key point of grammar in English, Vietnamese language does
not share this feature Vietnamese is one of the many languages that do not use
inflectional means to mark tenses In Vietnamese the verbs are always in the infinitive form, whereas English verbs are the most heavily inflected, having both a strong conjugation with internal vowel change, for example, sing, sang, sung, and a weak conjugation with dental suffixes indicating past tense, as in play, played The third person singular has an -s ending, as in does The structure of verbs in Vietnamese language is not complex, compared with that of The English verbs In order to form the
past tense, it is very simple for Vietnamese people to use the particle “da@’ Similarly,
the particle “sé” is used to form the future tense, and the particle “dang” to form the continuous tense Therefore, the use of tenses and aspects in English is challenging for Vietnamese students Table 2.5: Examples of interference errors in morphological change of verbs (Dam, 2001:3) VIETNAMESE ENGLISH
Ông thây đang dạy cú pháp tiếng Việt The teacher teaches Vietnamese syntax (instead of The teacher is teaching
Vietnamese syntax
Chúng tôi sông ở TP HCM từ năm 1975 We live in Ho Chi Minh city since 1975 (instead of We have lived in Ho Chi
Trang 38
: Minh city since 1975.)
‘Toi da gap một bạn cũ tuân rồi I meet an old friend last week
F (instead of He met an old friend last
week.)
WWhieu người chưa bao giờ nhìn thấy tuyét | Many people never see snow
(instead of Many people have_never seen snow.) SOT ES CLE FR PER bss Misuse of parts of speech due to the failure to identify them P
ipresent special difficulty for Vietnamese learners In the standard classification, English Le (2006:70) paid attention to the use of English parts of speech which may
‘words are Classified into eight major classes These parts of speech are used according to their function in the sentence On the contrary, different parts of speech in Vietnamese may have the same form For example, the word phdt trién may be translated into English words develop, development, developmental, developing, developed The grammatical function of a Vietnamese word is mainly shown in terms of
the context or word order Vietnamese students feel perplexed to identify an English
word belonging to which part of speech Therefore, it is likely for them to make errors when deciding which part of speech should be used in different cases
Table 2.6: Examples of interference errors in the misuse of parts of speech (Le, 2006:70)
VIETNAMESE ENGLISH
Chúng tôi hòan thành bài tập vê nhà
rất dễ dàng (instead of We have finished the homework We have finished the homework very easy
Trang 39
very easily.)
Hanh phic thi quan trong hon tién bac | Happy is more important than money instead of Happiness is more important than Be RE RR tr JET NET RETO MIP MO TRO money.)
Hú thuộc là thói quen không tối Smoke is a bad habit
F (instead of Smoking is a bad habit.)
bi thich cua anh ta la héi hoa His hobby is paint
ETE (instead of His hobby is painting.)
rs
Rự hấp dân của cuộc sông thành phô có |_ The aitractive oƒ city life can easily lead to ậ bẻ dé dang dan dén su phạm pháp của | juvenile delinqgueney `
lanh thiếu niên (instead of The attraction of city life can
easily lead to juvenile delinquency.) 5.2 Syntactical transfer L 15.2.1 Misuse of articles because of the absence of such articles in the Vietnamese language
Among the Vietnamese students of English, errors in article usage are highly predictable English has a number of articles, including the definite article the and the indefinite article a, an At times English nouns can be used without an article Some of he differences between definite, indefinite and zero article are not very difficult to earn, However, it is not quite easy for Vietnamese learners of English to grasp the fotion of articles because Vietnamese language uses them in different ways than English does In Vietnamese, the noun is often used in combination with such particles Is cdi, con, chiéc, cuc, etc to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun Vietnamese students feel perplexed when they decide which article should be used or
Trang 40Am: Ệ
ino articles at all Therefore, they often make such errors as omission of article, addition
i
tof article or wrong use of article In addition, Vietnamese students are likely to make
errors when dealing with countable nouns and uncountable nouns because the concept rabout countable nouns and uncountable nouns does not exist in Vietnamese
Table 2.7: Examples of interference errors in the misuse of articles (Dam, 2001:3)
VIETNAMESE ENGLISH
“Mary là cô gái vui tính Mary is Q funny girl (instead of Mary is a funny girl.)
Đó sẽ là giải pháp hoàn hảo cho vấn dé That would be @ perfect solution
to our problem
(instead of That would be the perfect
solution to our problem.)
cua ching ta
Ước mơ của anh ấy là trở thành luật sư His dream is to become @ lawyer, chứ không phải giáo viên not Ø teacher
(instead of His dream is to become a lawyer,
not a teacher
lôi thích âm nhạc, thơ ca và hội họa I love the music, the poetry and the art (instead of I love O music, O poetry and O
art.)
Chúng tôi hy vọng rằng chúng tôi sẽ | We truly hope that we will hear a good news sớm được nghe tin tốt lành SOOH
(instead of We truly hope that we will hear
Q good news soon.)
Đường phô đây rác rưởi The streets are full of garbages (instead of The streets are full of garbage.)
31