The influence of mother tongue on grammatical errors that students at ha noi community college usually make in writing

Ministry of education and training Hanoi university Pham Thi Kim Dung The influence of mother tongue on grammatical errors that students at Hanoi Community college usually make in writing Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements of the degree of master in tesol Supervisor: Pham Hong thuy, M.A Hanoi - May, 2009 Ministry of education and training Hanoi university Pham Thi Kim Dung The influence of mother tongue on grammatical errors that students at Hanoi community usually make in writing Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements of the degree of master in tesol Supervisor: Pham Hong thuy, M.A HANOI, MAY 2009 Table of contents TABLE OF CONTENTS II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV ABSTRACT V LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS VI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY 1.2 AIMS OF THE STUDY 1.3 SCOPE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1.5 OUTLINE OF THE THESIS CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW 10 2.1 THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR IN WRITING 10 2.2 THE INFLUENCE OF L1 ON L2 (PREVIOUS STUDIES RELATED TO THE STUDY) 11 2.3 AN OVER VIEW OF LEARNERS’ ERRORS 13 2.3.1 What is an error? 13 2.3.2 Errors and mistakes 15 2.3.3 Error classification 17 2.3.3.1 Types 18 2.3.3.2 Levels 18 2.4 ERROR ANALYSIS THEORIES 21 2.4.1 Concepts for Error Analysis (EA) 21 2.4.2 Key procedures for Error Analysis 22 2.4.2.1 Collection of a sample of learner language 23 2.4.2.2 Identification of errors 25 2.4.3.3 Description of errors 26 2.4.3.4 Explanation of errors 27 2.5 CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS (CA) 30 2.5.1 The strong version of contrastive analysis hypothesis 32 2.5.2 The weak version of contrastive analysis hypothesis 32 CHAPTER METHODOLOGY 33 DESCRIPTION OF THE SUBJECTS 33 ii 3.2 RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS 34 3.2.1 Introduction to a Final Achievement Test in general 34 3.2.2 Description of the Final Achievement Test used in the study 34 3.2.3 Data collection procedures of the test 35 3.3 CODING FRAMEWORK 36 CHAPTER IV FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 37 4.1 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 37 4.1.1 Analysis and discussion on the errors from the test papers 37 4.1.1.1 Identification 37 4.1.1.2 Description and discussion on the six most frequent categories of errors 38 4.1.2 Discussion and explanation on the grammatical errors 46 4.2 MAJOR FINDINGS 61 4.2.1 Major findings on the most frequent grammatical errors 61 4.2.2 Major findings on how much mother tongue influence on students’ errors 61 4.3 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER TEACHING STRATEGIES 62 4.3.1 Teachers’ identifying students’ learning difficulties 62 4.3.2 Reducing the negative effects of the mother tongue 63 4.3.3 Dealing with L1 influenced errors 65 4.3.4 Encouraging students to use English 67 4.3.5 Improving the teaching of EFL writing 68 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 70 5.1 CONCLUSION 70 5.2 LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES 71 REFERENCES 72 APPENDIXES 77 iii Acknowledgements First of all, I am very grateful to my supervisor Mrs Pham Hong Thuy M.A for her reading and piloting the manuscript and for providing invaluable comments and feedback on this research paper I would also like to thank all the teachers of the Department of Post Graduate at Hanoi University for their precious lectures, which proved to be very useful for my thesis My thanks are also devoted to all my colleagues and students at Hanoi Community College who have supported and contributed their ideas during my data collection for this study Last but not least, I would especially like to record my gratitude to my husband and my daughters, without whose support and encouragement, this paper would not have been finished iv Abstract The EFL students’ native language has made its permanent home in their mind, resulting in the negative transfer of the students’ own language to the target language This thesis entitles “The influences of mother tongue on basis grammatical errors that students at Hanoi Community College usually make in their writing” is carried out to achieve three main objectives: (1) to investigate writing grammatical errors that students at HCC often make, (2) to carefully identify one of the causes (mother tongue influence) of the errors the students often make and (3) to work out suitable adjustments on writing teaching strategies at HCC The tests of 136 subjects in the first year classes at HCC were studied as sources for collecting interference errors Through the qualitative analyzed data, the findings clarified the six most frequent grammatical errors made by the students and indicated that the mother tongue influences on the students’ errors more than other causes Based on the findings, recommendations for dealing with the first language interference and for enhancing the teaching of EFL writing are put forward The conclusion supports the systematicity of Vietnamese transfer in English essays of pre-intermediate learners in non-native speaking environment and summarizes the possible measures to reduce this interference phenomenon v List of abbreviations CA Contrastive Analysis EA Error Analysis EFL English as a Foreign Language GE General English ESP English for Specific Purposes L1 Mother Tongue (Vietnamese) L2 Second Language vi Chapter I Introduction 1.1 Background to the study Hanoi Community College (HCC) is a new college Its students major in different specialties such as Accounting, Business Administration, Construction, Information Technology, Electricity Technical Technology, etc At this college, English is taught as a compulsory subject for first and second year college students and it is divided into two parts: General English (150 classroom hours) and English for Special Purposes (60 classroom hours) In General English, the material used for students’ learning is Lifelines Intermediate by Tom Hutchinson At this period, students are provided with basic language knowledge such as grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation to develop the four language skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing In writing skill, students seem to meet a lot of difficulties in expressing their ideas In this study, the researcher only focuses on the influences of mother tongue on grammatical errors made by students in learning writing Along with language knowledge and other three skills, writing exercises are usually required and evaluated as a part of the total assessment of each semester But there is a fact that students often get a lot of problems in expressing their ideas in English in their writing They translate word by word, idiomatic expressions, vocabulary and especially grammatical rules of their first language (L1) into the second language (L2) As a result, they not usually get good marks or have good paragraph writings These problems cause a lot of grammatical errors in students’ writing works In other words, the students negatively transfer features of the first language into the second language, and as a result, their written communication with native English speakers may encounter difficulties and even breakdown A better understanding of students’ errors in EFL writing will help teachers recognize students’ difficulties in learning English It will also aid in the adoption of appropriate teaching strategies to help students in learning English as well as boost students’ writing accuracy and fluency and help them a lot in their ESP course and their job in the future 1.2 Aims of the study This study aims at helping students to improve their writing skills by reducing the bad influence impact of mother tongue on students’ writing In order to reach the aim the following objectives will be discovered - Investigating the most frequent errors students are prone to make when writing a paragraph to describe or narrate an event - Identifying one of the reasons that causes the errors in students’ writing – the influence of mother tongue (Vietnamese) - Providing some practical guidelines for teachers, so that they can help students deal with this type of errors in writing 1.3 Research questions To reach the aim of the study, the following questions are focused on: What are the most frequent grammatical errors students often make in their writing? How much does mother tongue influence on students’ errors? 1.4 Scope and significance of the study The study deals with 136 first year students learning in three different classes at three different faculties The focus of the study is on the L1-related grammatical errors made by these students in their final term GE writing test papers Ideally, the study should have analyzed the results of more tests However, due to the limited time for the study, only one test is considered The researcher hopes that the findings of this study can be used as criteria for material development herself and other teachers in the college It would enable them to isolate the errors the students make, and then they could provide the proper teaching materials and strategies to correct students’ errors in general and the ones caused by L1 in students are being taught, so that they can learn vocabulary and sentence structures in context Remember that when an item of vocabulary or sentence structure is introduced for the first time to the students, the teacher should explain it and point out the difference between the target language and the mother tongue if he/she sees that there is possibility of L1 interference There is a widely held belief that in order to be good writers, students need to read a lot In her book “Techniques in teaching writing”, Raims (1983, p.50) states, “Reading is the only activity that gives the learners access to unlimited amounts of the target language if they are studying English where the learners have little opportunity to speak English or hear it spoken The more our students read, the more they become familiar with the vocabulary, idioms, sentence patterns, organizational flow and cultural assumptions of native speakers of the language” Secondly, if they want to be good writers, students need to write a lot Apart from their “compulsory” papers in class, students should exchange ideas with the teachers in the form of journals Regular practice enables them gradually from the new habit of thinking in English when writing, and give up the old practice of writing the first draft in Vietnamese then translating it into English This “translation” method may lead the inexperienced learners to word-for-word rending, resulting in interference errors It is because of this that teachers should avoid “translation” as a teaching method in the writing classroom Furthermore, teachers should create a natural language learning environment in the classroom, where the teacher and the learners use English as much as possible –i.e., the learners can experience the target language as a real language According to the interactionists’ hypothesis (Lightbown and Spada 1993, p.83), “when the learners are given the opportunities to engage in conversation, they are compelled to express and clarify their intentions, thought, opinions, etc in a way which permits them to arrive at a mutual understanding The negotiation of meaning, in turn lead the learners to acquire the language forms, the words and grammatical structures” Conversational interaction enables students through fluency towards accuracy 64 In short, reading, writing, speaking and listening to the target language a lot may prevent the learners from being strongly influenced by the mother tongue 4.3.3 Dealing with L1 influenced errors Although the students make every effort to limit the negative effects of the mother tongue, interference errors are unavoidable These errors are not considered a failure in second language acquisition but “reveal the patterns of learners developing interlanguage systems – showing where they have inappropriately transferred a first language rule to the L2” (Lightbown and Spada 1993, p.114) Therefore, how to correct the interference errors effectively is my great concern Hardly has any specific research been done on interference error correction Whether the errors are traceable to L1 interference or independent of L1 interference, error correction will work on the basic principle that correction must not aim to criticize learners, but to support them by giving information of feedback (Edge 1989, p.16) Error treatment must be a subtle task; it is not as simple as it appears As indicated by Lightbown and Spada (1993, p.115), “excessive error correction can have a strong negative effect on motivation” Very often, the teacher’s good intentions work against him/her: discouraging students’ learning Students like the teacher’s correcting their errors but almost all of them find it very depressing to get their papers back with lots of teacher correction on them In reality, the researcher knows from her own experience that many students just look at the mark and put the paper away Thus, the teacher should correct students’ errors with caution Some of the strategies for correcting interference errors should be presented as follows: First of all, the researcher thinks that enabling the students to understand their L1 interference is the most important thing in effective errors correction The teacher needs to analyze how a certain interference error comes about by explaining carefully the difference of the particular feature in L1 and L2 in terms of morphology, semantics or syntax depending on the specific problem involved In other words, the comparative technique (L1-L2) has to be adopted It is hoped that once the students are aware of their own errors, subsequent pieces of writing will carry fewer errors of the same type However, the teacher should not expect the students “to get it right” immediately after 65 the first correction It is impossible to give up a habit overnight! The correction may thus require many repetitions Turning to the quantity of correction, the teacher should choose only particular errors to focus on at one time of making corrections so as not to depress the learners It is useful to draw the learners’ attention to persistent errors, which are shared by almost all students in a class, or to important errors, for which communicative language use may breakdown The teacher can point out interference errors besides other errors by cycling or underlining them and write the signal “L1” in the margin In comparison with the interference errors in the category of morphology, those in the categories of semantics and syntax are more important, and thus require greater concentration That does not mean the former type of interference errors can be ignored, but the nature of correction depends on the importance of errors To deal with morphological errors such as the dropping of plural markers and tense markers, and the omission of adverb endings, etc., the teacher can remind the students of correctness by giving brief explanation and practice, if necessary For complicated errors concerning word choice and especially sentence patterns, the teacher has to analyze them carefully and let the learners written exercises aimed at reinforcing the explanation “Only after much practice of the same patterns with diverse content the patterns themselves become productively automatic, without conscious thought” (Fries, in Frank 1993, p.57) For error correction to work positively, the learners should be involved in judgments about correctness The more the students are involved in correction, the more they become accurate in their own use of the language (Edge 1989, p.50) Lightbown and Spada (1993, p.115) also assert, “second language learners can provide each other with corrective feedback in group work interaction if this is carefully planned” Therefore, we think, “peer correction” is a good form of correction which helps learners cooperate and develop an ability to see their own mistakes Indeed, the students learn a lot from peer-correction At first, this correction form is quite new and unfamiliar to Vietnamese learners, who are used to working as separate individuals and who can only learn or accept correction from the teacher Nevertheless, peer-correction, for its virtues, should be gradually introduced in combination with teacher-correction which is conducted with tact and consideration in the form of whole-class correction The teacher can put on the blackboard the most important mistakes from a class’s writing for discussion The 66 discussions between teacher and students and between students and students are very useful; learners understand their errors, develop a positive attitude to errors and finally feel encouraged to express themselves more accurately What is more, peer correction may well reduce the amount of errors, particularly morphological ones so that the teacher can spend more time on the more important ones 4.3.4 Encouraging students to use English Another matter that teachers should pay much attention to is the influence of Vietnamese (L1) in students’ writing The study reveals that most of the errors are traceable to L1 transfer In order to avoid L1 interference in writing, it is better to encourage students to use L2 As for Nation (1997), in some countries, English and the L1 in competition with each other and the use of English increases at the expense of the L1 Teachers need to show respect for the learners’ L1 and need to avoid doing things that make the L1 seem inferior to English At the same time, it is the English teacher’s job to help learners develop their proficiency in English Thus, a balance approach is needed which sees a role for the L1 but also recognizes the important of maximizing L2 use in the classroom Nation (1997) also suggested that in classes where learners all share the same first language or national language, teachers need to use a range of options to encourage learners to use the L2 as much as possible The following range of options is based on the idea that there are several reasons why learners use L1 when they should be using L2 These reasons include low proficiency in the L2, shyness in using L2, or simply a lack of interest in learning L2 Here are some of the ways of dealing with these obstacles to L2 use with students at HCC Choose manageable tasks that are within the students’ proficiency level Prepare students for tasks by pre-teaching the language items and skills needed Use staged and graded tasks that bring students up to the level required Get students to pretend to be English speakers 67 Make the L2 an unavoidable part of the task Retelling activities, strip stories, completion activities, and role plays all require the use of the L2 Repeat tasks to make them easier Inform students of the learning goals of each task so that they can see how using the L2 will help them achieve a clear short term learning goal Discuss with the students the value of using the L2 in class Get students to discuss the reasons why they avoid using the L2 and get them to suggest solutions to encourage L2 use 10 Remind students to use the L2 For example, when doing speaking tasks in a group, students of this group are required each other of using L2 11 Use no-threatening tasks Students can choose their own group; the teacher can stay out of the groups, allow students to prepare well for the tasks, avoid using tasks that put them in embarrassing situations, and choose interesting, non-threatening topics 4.3.5 Improving the teaching of EFL writing For almost all the teachers of English, writing is difficult to teach The explanation for this is that writing requires high accuracy and thus demands so much time and effort that few learners feel interested in this subject Therefore, how to stimulate students’ interest in writing and how to help them write English better is a constant headache to the teachers Traditionally, writing is taught as a solitary activity on the part of the student writer: students, as separate individuals, have to struggle with the language to produce a piece of writing Harold Rosen (in Hedge 1988, p.5) describes “the writer as lonely figure cut off from the stimulus and corrective of listeners” According to her, “the write is condemned to monologue; there is no one to help out, to fill the silence, put words in his mouth, or make encouraging noises” Indeed, this method of teaching writing kills the learners’ inspiration, so it should give way to new modern method- communicative Language Teaching 68 It should be done in mind that writing is a means of communication In reality, we always write for a certain purpose and to a certain audience The communicative language teaching turns the writing classroom into a workshop, a conference in which the student writers interact with each other in pairs or in groups Such communicative interaction makes the writing task livelier and more realistic – students see a relationship between writer and reader Also, working together on writing generates lots of interesting ideas and improve the language use This means cooperative work helps the students to overcome their difficulties in writing EFL such as lack of ideas and lack of vocabulary and sentence structures As Hedge (1988, p.12) points out, “collaborative writing in the classroom generates discussions and activities which encourage an effective process of writing” Here the process of writing is taken into consideration, not the product only It is clear that communicative language teaching, if well-organized by the teacher now as a controller, a prompter, and a participant contributes in useful ways to the effective teaching and learning of writing Writing is no longer a boring task; the students feel they make progress in written communication, and the teacher needs no much time to deal with a load of mistakes because the students, in group work, help each other to correct many of them Last but not least, culture of the target language should also be involved in the process of teaching writing; in other words, learning a language and its culture must be carried out simultaneously Rivers (1981, p.315) insists, “language cannot be separated completely from the culture in which it is deeply embedded” By learning the target culture, the Vietnamese learners of English will be able to understand the way the English speakers conceptualize an idea or “fact” and learn the word or sentence structure in which the idea is expressed In this way, the learners will also get motivated to learn written English 69 Chapter V Conclusion and recommendations 5.1 Conclusion This study has covered five chapters of a full analysis of errors made by the students at HCC The study is conducted on various theoretical bases of error analysis and contrastive analysis The models of error analysis by Corder (1974) and James (1998) are applied in this study; especially, the error classification model by James helps the researcher much in identifying and categorizing errors Theories of the explanation of errors at the end of chapter lay a foundation on the researcher’s statement about the possible causes of errors in chapter The analysis of the test papers suggests the following conclusions Verb errors, prepositional errors, noun errors, article errors, subject omission errors and subject-verb agreement errors are the six most frequent grammatical errors in students’ writing Appearance of mother tongue interference errors in the subjects’ written English is frequent and systematic despite the fact that the subjects are often reminded of correctness This may be taken as a proof for the important role of mother tongue influence in foreign language learning process This study indicates various errors made by our students and ranks the most frequent error categories, which can serve as an indication for teachers to better understand what errors their students could make and provide suitable instructions thereby The study proves the great significance to error analysis as it helps teachers understand more about students’ error making process and the difficulties they are meeting to overcome these errors While it is impossible to remove interference errors from the Vietnamese learners of English’s writing, it is quite logical to think that errors of this source will quantitatively decrease with the increase of the learners’ mastery of the target language The teacher of EFL writing should, therefore, expose students to a lot of real or authentic writing, explain carefully the meanings and usage of new words and structures, and also teach cultures associated with them To deal with interference errors, the teacher has to adopt 70 the comparative technique (L1 – L2) and provide reinforcement exercises of various types By creating a “natural” language teaching environment, the communicative language teaching method together with the use of pair work and group work helps promote an effective process of learning the English language, particularly written English 5.2 Limitations and recommendations for further studies Due to the limited time as well as the scope of the study, this study has not covered all errors found from the test papers and every aspect of Vietnamese influence in the English language In addition, this study only focuses on word and sentence structures Therefore, more research needs to be implemented on the organization of ideas Motivation, language proficiency, or gender of the learners may also be used to find out the relationship between errors and their influential factors Lexical errors and misspelling should be analyzed in details to have better explanation for the cause Furthermore, the emphasis of my study is on the interfering effects of the first language, which hinder the second language learning What are the facilitating effects of the native language? 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English Journal, 92 (3) 75 Wardhaugh R 1970 The contrastive analysis hypothesis TESOL Quarterly, 4, 123-130 76 Appendixes Sample of tests 77 78 ...Ministry of education and training Hanoi university Pham Thi Kim Dung The influence of mother tongue on grammatical errors that students at Hanoi community usually make in writing Submitted in. .. objectives: (1) to investigate writing grammatical errors that students at HCC often make, (2) to carefully identify one of the causes (mother tongue influence) of the errors the students often make and... by the influence of mother tongue Chapter V is the Conclusion and limitations of the study The conclusion summarizes the content of the study The limitations of the study and some recommendations