STRATEGIES FOR REDUCING L2 ENGLISH GRAMMAR ERRORS WITH L1 CHINESE WRITERS

Abstract

We propose teaching strategies for dealing with most pervasive errors made by L1 Chinese writers in the domain of several L2 English grammatical categories, such as agreement, articles, and relative clauses. These errors arise due to considerable differences between learners’ native language structure and English. Based on a number of student essays from the University of Connecticut Writing Center, first we identify the most common errors for each of the above mentioned grammatical categories – the omission of agreement markers, the omission and overuse of articles, and the omission of relative pronouns. We then propose strategies for minimizing such errors by employing indirect teacher’s feedback and follow-up activities.