Causes of and Remedies for Chinglish in Chinese College Students’ Writings英文文献资料.docVIP

Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 2012. Vol.2, No.2, 71-78 Published Online June 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ojml) /10.4236/ojml.2012.22009 Causes of and Remedies for Chinglish in Chinese College Students’ Writings Ping Wang , Weiping Wang 1 2 School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China 1 2 Foreign Language Department, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China Email: Wangping1013@126.com Received March 19 , 2012; revised May 2 , 2012; accepted May 9 , 2012 th nd th Based on Interlanguage Theory and other theories, this study examines data from samples of Chinese col- lege students’ writings and interviews with the students to explore the causes of and remedies for Chinglish (a term used to refer English with Chinese characteristics). It claims that Chinglish is mainly caused by syntactic transfer from Chinese, the influence of Chinese thought patterns, inadequate exposure to authentic English and insufficient practice in English writing. The interviews with the students showed that the proportion of L1 thinking decreased with the writer’s L2 development. The recommended reme- dies for Chinglish include raising students’ awareness of distinctions between English and Chinese, in- creasing their exposure to authentic English and practice in English writing, and adjusting their thought patterns. Keywords: Chinglish; ESL Writing; Causes; Remedies Introduction describe the mixture of Chinese and English. Chinglish as dis- cussed in this paper is mainly an issue of appropriateness of language use rather than correctness because all the so-called Chinglish examples are actually grammatically correct, as in the example “He was very excited and he couldn’t speak a word.” However,