Challenges for Chinese EFL students in grammar learning
Grammar teaching in China
Ellis (2006) stated that teaching grammar was undoubtedly a necessary foundation of achieving accuracy and fluency of the language. In China, grammar teaching has always played an important part in the EFL classes for years.Even though teachers attach great importance to grammar teaching, the outcome is not as obvious as they have expected (Zhou, 2017; Ji & Liu, 2018).
Chinese EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge of their native language will affect their understanding of English grammar. Therefore, it is very necessary to do a comparison between Chinese and English grammar and find out the differences in aspects like morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. In this way, the EFL students can recognize the respective characteristics between L1 and L2 from the theory of language science and master language knowledge proficiently and improve the ability to use it. Additionally, according to the differences, the teachers can target the major difficulties in grammar learning for the Chinese students precisely, and then specially adapt teaching and learning methods to make grammar lessons more effective and interesting for the Chinese EFL students.
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The Common Grammatical Mistakes Made by Chinese EFL Learners
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The frequent errors made by Chinese students and provided an analysis on these errors to help EFL teachers generalize useful pedagogical implications for grammar teaching. Zhan (2015) concluded that the most frequent error in Chinese students’ writings is the misuse of tenses and verb forms. As noted by Zhan (2015), “others include those in spelling, use of particular words and phrases, Chinese-English expression, singular and plural form of nouns, parts of speech, non-finite verbs, run-on sentences, pronouns and so on” (p. 72). Teachers should pay attention to these key points while teaching grammar so that they can prevent the students from making these errors repeatedly. Tan (2018) identified and categorized ten of the most common errors that Chinese EFL learners made and presented them in the Table below.
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An asterisk (*) before a word or a sentence indicates an error.
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The Key Grammatical Knowledge for Chinese EFL Students
Based on the analysis of the common grammatical mistakes made by Chinese EFL learners, researchers and educators summed up some major differences of Chinese grammar: (1) The form of singular and plural nouns remains the same. A number or a suffix is added to the singular to indicate the plural rather than changing the noun itself. (2) Subject-verb agreement is not attended to in Chinese grammar. There is no change of the verbs to match with the corresponding subjects. (3) The form of the verbs stays the same with the various changes of different tenses in Chinese. Adverbials of time are adopted to indicate the present tense, past tense, or future tense instead of changing the verb tense according to the voice grammar. (4) The concept of articles does not exist in Chinese. The closest concept to articles is quantity words. (5) There is no strong distinction between different prepositions in Chinese. For example, the word “在” [zài] is simply used as the same meaning of covering all these prepositions (at, on, in) when regarding times and places. (6) When multiple adjectives describe a noun, the adjective word order in Chinese is different from English. (7) The form of the pronoun stays the same with both subject pronoun and object pronoun. (8) The subject is not a must in a sentence if the meaning that the sentence conveys is clear. (9) The word order in declarative sentences is the same with interrogative sentences in Chinese. (10) Two or more verbs or verb phases can work as predicate verbs in one simple sentence in Chinese, and the order of this serial verb construction cannot be reversed. (11) The conjunctions in Chinese often work in pairs in one sentence (Gu, 2008; Tan, 2018; Tang, 2018; Yip & Rimmington, 2005).
The impact of these differences can become an obstacle when it comes to English grammar learning for Chinese EFL learners. Tang (2018) explained that many Chinese EFL learners are impacted by the rules of Chinese grammar that when they encounter difficulties, they tend to apply their implicit knowledge of Chinese to English unconsciously in EFL class; therefore, in order to help Chinese EFL learners to acquire English better, EFL teachers and learners need to notice and comprehend the different points of grammatical knowledge between English and Chinese.