Implication for teaching and learning English
5.1 Typical mistakes made by Vietnamese learners.
With respect to teaching and learning language, transfer is an interaction between two languages; it helps learners to gather new information faster on the basis of former knowledge.
In English, there are seven patterns of simple sentence and Vietnamese has also seven equivalent ones. These similarities help students master them promptly. Students easily create the seven sentences patterns because the order of sentence elements in Vietnamese and English is generally the same.
E.g.: She gave me a book
Nàng đưa tôi một cuốn sách
As mentioned above, besides similarities between these two languages, difference can be easily found. It is rather difficult for all learners to understand these differences or overcome the difficulties caused by them. As a result, they make a lot of mistakes during their learning process.
The result of the contrastive analysis done above makes it possible to find out some mistakes made by Vietnamese learners when learning English. From my observation, from my colleague, my students, I found out that many students makes mistakes in linearity. Following are some typical ones:
i) There is the transformational relation in the English language, so English people often use passive voice sentence to stress object of the sentence. In the Vietnamese language, there are no forms of passive verbs. Perhaps, this difference makes it difficult for Vietnamese learners to get familiar to passive sentence. For example, in order to translate the English sentence “I was bitten by a snake”. Some students often have “word by word” equivalent. This means “Tôi bị cắn bởi một con rắn”. This is not standard Vietnamese sentence. In Vietnamese, we have a equivalent “ Tôi bị rắn cắn”. The object of sentence “rắn” can be put between “bị” and main verb “cắn”. This does not occur in English.
ii) In addition, one thing that Vietnamese people often misunderstand is that, in some case, “bị”
and “được” do not mean passive. Sometimes, “bị” and “được” can be used in active sentence.
That is why learners tend to use English passive voice for all “bị, được” Vietnamese sentence regardless of their meaning. For example, in the following sentence:
E.g.: Anh ấy được điểm 10 ngày hôm qua.
Obviously, he got 10 mark by himself. So this is active sentence, not passive.
Incorrect: “He was gotten mark 10 yesterday”.
Correct: “He got mark 10 yesterday”.
Or the other examples:
Anh ấy được đi nước ngoài Incorrect: He is gone abroad
Họ được nghỉ làm sớm
Incorrect: They are stopped work earlier.
The meaning of “được” in this case is for the permission or “bị” is for the obligation.
So in Vietnamese, one should be aware of these structures.
Still there are some cases, in which, Vietnamese simple sentences do not consist of “bị”
and “được”, but, in fact, they are passive sentences.
E.g.: Tôi vừa đi cắt tóc
They are passive sentences because, I myself did not cut my hair or I cannot repair my car myself. Someone cuts my hair. Many learners cannot realize this difference.
They used “I go to cut my hair” instead of “I have my hair cut”.
iii) Many students do not know the inversion patterns C S V or A S V so when they translate Vietnamese sentences: “Anh ta có lẽ giầu” or “Tôi ở đây” into English , most use the patterns S V C or S V A
E.g.: He may be rich
S V C
I am here
S V C
Only few students use the inverted order:
Rich as he may be
C S V
Here I am
A S V
iv) Many students have mistakes in the way to translate “inverted” sentence from English and Vietnamese and vice versa. With the English sentence “Here is your key” in which adverbial is at the beginning of the sentence: AVS pattern, in Vietnamese there is always a change in position of sentence elements “Chìa khoá của ngài đây ạ”, not: “Đây ạ, chìa khoá của ngài”.
v) On the account of being effected by mother tongue, some students do not use lexical verb
“to be” in English when they are asked to translate Vietnamese into English.
E.g.: Câu bé này thông minh S (NP1) Adj
Incorrect sentence: This boy clever S Adj
Correct sentence: This boy is clever
S V C
They make the mistake because the lexical verb “to be” = “là” does not sometimes exist in this type of Vietnamese sentence.
In conclusion, when learning English as foreign language, making mistakes is very common for the Vietnamese learners, especially the beginners because there are some differences between two languages. Their mistakes are also caused by their misinterpretation of linearity in the English affirmative and its counterpart in the Vietnamese affirmative sentence.
5.2 Suggested types of exercises
Above we have mentioned some common mistakes made by Vietnamese learners when studying English as the foreign language. However, the question how to avoid them is easy to answer. The problem depends on time. So the best way to study the English affirmative simple sentence and its linearity is to practice both languages regularly. It means that students themselves have to practice much more form simple structures to complex ones. Daily practice, mainly with own effort, with the help of teachers will make students more confident in studying. In my study, I give some types of exercises which help teachers and students teaching and learning the linearity in English affirmative simple sentence. (See appendix)