Chinese English Learners

Due date for responses: Mon., Jan. 26th, by class time.
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My reading summary was on the text called A Contrastive Guide to Teach English to Chinese Students by Nancy Duke S. Lay. In the book, Nancy discusses many issues that teachers face when teaching English to Chinese students. She talks about the problems these students have with speaking, writing, and understanding English. The text is too long to summarize fully in a short blog. However, I will summarize the differences in grammar between Chinese and English that cause these students to write with improper grammar.
Nancy explains that in Chinese word order, or syntax, determines the function of the word. The position of the word indicates numbers, persons, and tenses. A sentence in Chinese is understood by the meaning of the sentence as a whole, whereas in English the sentence gets its meaning from each word. Chinese students’ grammar problems stem from the differences in the way that words are ordered in a sentence in Chinese compared to English. Example: Chinese: I no want.
English: No, I do not want it.
Or
Chinese: She why leave?
English: Why did she leave?
These examples bring up another grammatical difference between English and Chinese. In Chinese the auxiliary verb ‘do’ does not exist. As a result, Chinese students tend to leave out verbs like do in their sentences. There is a word that is similar to ‘do’ in Chinese but it is closer to the meaning of the word ‘are’. From this confusion, Chinese students tend to write ‘are’ when they should write ‘do’ in their sentences.
One other difference that I feel would cause Chinese students to write improperly is the difference between our punctuation marks. In Chinese, a dash is used to separate a list of things in a sentence, whereas in English a comma is used. Not to mention, commas are not used in the same way that they are in English. Instead of quotation marks, they use a colon or a symbol. Their exclamation mark is used to express hope, fear, hate, or a command. Having different meanings and symbols for punctuation marks makes it difficult for these students to use the proper punctuation in English.
There are many more differences between correct grammar in English and Chinese. However, these are the ones that I feel cause the most problems for teachers to teach English to Chinese students.