GRE写作Issue模拟题:The Importance of Science and Art

作者词汇基础扎实；从句比例偏少，简单句稍微偏多了；语言不流畅；连词使用偏少。

When asking these junior students such questions like that how you write an essay. Nearly half of these students answered that they would have a Chinese structure in their mind, then they translated Chinese into English word by word. Obviously, they would commit errors unavoidably. In the process of translation, they took mother tongue rules as English regularities. Therefore, it could be considered that mother tongue transfer was the main cause of errors of types of A,C and D. Among those three error types, errors of type D: countable noun used with no -s occurred most frequently. Let’s look at an example: One of my favorite subject is English. From this sentence, we could see that “subject” was a countable noun. However, there was no “s” after “subject”. Junior students ignored the plural form as -s in countable nouns. When learning a foreign language, learners might translate the foreign language into their native language randomly and negatively. Errors of type D were mainly caused by mother tongue transfer. Thus, it could be evaluated that the error of type D was caused by the inter-lingual of mother tongue. From those errors in compositions and the interview, mother tongue was becoming a much more problem in learning English. Meanwhile, errors of type A were also caused by inter-lingual error and there was also a typical example: Cindy often search the Internet to get informations. There was a regularity in English grammar that abstract nouns and mass nouns were usually uncountable while these words are countable in Chinese. For example, we could say “一条信息” in Chinese, yet, “an information” was not allowed in English. Therefore, Chinese students committed such errors most frequently and this difficulty might become an obstacle in learning English. Errors of type C was also caused by the mother tongue interference. In the process of learning English, it’s known to us all that a single noun must be used with a determiner while one in Chinese was not necessary. Now, let’s see an example: We may have examination tomorrow. (我们明天有考试) Obviously, the junior student translated Chinese sentences into English word by word. He/She did not have English thought in his/her mind. As they had claimed before, when starting an essay, they would make a general structure in Chinese mind. Then, they translated them into English literally. Just in the process, they committed such errors of type A, C and D. Mother tongue caused such errors that became an obstacle to English learners. Dulay (1983) had ever defined interference as automatic transfer, due to habits, of the surface structure of the target language. Inter-lingual sources were also called mother tongue interference. Some linguists found that the major obstacle to learning a foreign was learners’ first language. Ellis (1999) thought that the first language was a resource language that learner would absorb knowledge from it when learning second language. She also thought that such errors could be often found in beginners’ compositions. Junior students could be regarded as beginners and it was not surprised to find that such errors occurred most frequently.