Having worked in English language education, teaching and assessment in China for over twelve years, I have noticed certain trends in the language difficulties Chinese learners of English experience. I share them here as a resource for other English teachers. I will no doubt update this post a few times as this is by no means exhaustive.
The following observations are not true of all Chinese learners of English (there are millions upon millions of them so expect some variation) but there are nevertheless observable patterns. These observations are not presented in any particular order (i.e. not order of importance, frequency or any method of sequencing) but I have tried to group them under related headings.
1. Commonly Confused Words
1.1 Very/too
In my very first English lesson in China I noticed a systematic error in the students’ textbook – confusion between very and too. The characters in the book were exclaiming, ‘Oh, my kite is flying too high!’ when they meant ‘My kite is flying very high!’ I used the story of Icarus to explain the difference between very and too to them. It seemed to work.
1.2 Kitchen/chicken
Students often switch these two words in spoken English so you get messages like, ‘My home has four rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom and a big chicken.’
1.3 Concubine/cucumber
Obviously this is an error only associated with learners who are sufficiently high-level to know these two words. It occasionally pops out at meal times when I have been politely asked whether I would like to eat some concubines. I reply, ‘If the emperor doesn’t mind. Are his girlfriends delicious?’ and the error is usually spotted.
1.4 Apartment/department
This is another spoken language switch. This one can be very confusing as it is unclear whether the student is talking about their home (an apartment they live in), their work (a department that they work for) or even a shopping mall (a department store that they often visit). These subjects can all occur together in context (e.g. at the start of an IELTS speaking test) so it is something that students need to be made aware of.
1.5 Love/laugh
This is a listening issue. When asked about something that made them laugh, students often respond with some formulaic pap about somebody or something they love. I can only assume that Chinese learners do not talk about comedy very much in English classes, although the words fun and funny are commonly known (if misused, see 2 below).
1.6 Walk/work
Again, I believe this is a listening issue. This one has a clearly identifiable cause – the problem that many Chinese speakers of English have in pronouncing the L. The result in conversation is a non sequitur response to an interlocutor’s question as in the following example:
A: Do you like walking in the countryside?
B: No, I want to work in an office.
2. Word Form Errors
The following list of words are often used erroneously and are commonly observable in student writing as well as in their spoken language. I really have no idea why Chinese students seem to find it so difficult to get these word forms correct, especially the first one as it is usually the very subject that they are studying!
Economics, economic, economy
Society, social
Technology, technological
Health, healthy
Easy, easily
Fun, funny
Good, well
Tend, tendency & trend
(Students have become so confused over this last one that they have actually coined a new word: trendency)
3. Words Used Incorrectly
3.1 Play computer
I get the impression that this is becoming less common and that most students are now taught the lexical chunk ‘play computer games.‘ Nevertheless, doing a bit of assessment work last week, I still heard several instances of statements like, ‘I like to play computer.’ More work is clearly needed in English classes to eradicate this awkward-sounding error.
3.2 Pretty
The use of pretty to mean very or quite has been noticeably overused by some students who I have examined recently. I presume that this was recommended by their teachers in an effort to gain marks through idiomatic or native-like speech. However, for such usage to gain marks, it must be used appropriately and accurately, which is unfortunately often not the case when it comes to pretty. For example, here is a sentence that I heard a couple of times from the mouth of an examination candidate:
I pretty enjoy it. X
This would be much better if it was simply “I enjoy it.” I ran the word pretty through a simple concordancing tool on lextutor (click here to see the result) and it seems that this usage of pretty collocates as follows:
sth is pretty good √
sb did pretty well √
sth is pretty bad √
sth is /sb was pretty hard/soft √
sth happened pretty quietly/quickly/slowly/etc √
For teachers and their students who insist on using pretty in these ways, it may be worth exploring the concordance lines in greater detail 🙂
3.3 Separately
When describing visualised data in written language (e.g. an IELTS Writing Task 1 exercise), many students use the word separately as a synonym for respectively. This is not possible! Whoever is teaching this, PLEASE STOP IT! Compare the two examples below:
[Correct √] The bar chart shows that the figures for [data set label] are 15%, 21% and 35% respectively.
[Incorrect X] The bar chart below shows that the figures for [data set label] are 15%, 21% and 35% separately.
It should also be noted that regarding the description of data in academic tasks, the most important thing is to express the point very clearly. It is not necessary to try to cram in a lot of unnecessary or inappropriate lexis. If nothing is shown to be increasing or decreasing, it does not make any sense to write about things increasing, decreasing or fluctuating. JUST DESCRIBE WHAT IS SHOWN ON THE DIAGRAM/GRAPH.
Here are a couple of articles I wrote about the incorrect use of words:
There is an important problem for learners here – how to identify words and lexical chunks that are being used incorrectly or inappropriately? One obvious answer is to listen to the teacher but the errors listed above are so common that I suspect that the incorrect usage may be being taught by some teachers. Another very good method is to read a lot – the more you read the more vocabulary and lexical patterns you will come across and this will give you a much clearer idea of what is appropriate and what is not. Of course, not every student has time to read extensively, so is there a short cut? Yes there is! A former colleague and current lecturer at Liverpool Xian Jiaotong University in Suzhou suggested that his students perform a simple Google search (or Yahoo if you are in China with no VPN) when they want to check if they are using words correctly. If the word or lexical chunk appears in hits from English language websites, it is probably safe. However, if it appears only in Chinese English teaching websites (as is the case for ‘it is manifest that‘), you can reasonably assume that the lexis under investigation is probably just Chinglish and best avoided.
4. Pronunciation
4.1 L at the end of a word
Even very high-level students can find this very difficult indeed. It can make it very difficult to distinguish between different words in spoken English: poor/pool; tower/towel; door/doll; to, too, two/tool
I have found some entertainment as well as a little success in using tongue-twisters but this can also be frustrating for the student. Some tongue-twisters that I have found helpful are still accessible on my old website (click on the image below):
Note that many people from SE China really struggle with Rs and Ws as well as Ls. Try ‘a loyal warrior rarely worries’ with them!
4.2 Usually & Pleasure
This is a strange pronunciation issue where the ʒ phoneme (represented as an S in the spelling of usually and pleasure) is omitted. This means that usually becomes an awkward almost non-sound (especially when the speaker also has issues pronouncing the L) and pleasure becomes ‘player.’ I have no idea why this should be a problem in China since Mandarin Chinese also has the ʒ phoneme. I can only assume that this is an error that was in an influential Chinese textbook and has somehow stuck. The issue with usually is easily cured in the classroom by writing Chinese pinyin on the board: Yu Zhi Li. When a student uses the ‘player’ pronunciation of pleasure, I will ask whether he/she means a football player or a basketball player, which will elicit a great deal of confusion and make the important point that clear pronunciation is necessary if you want people to understand you.
4.3 Clothes
The word clothes suffers from a double whammy of pronunciation issues. Not only is the TH often switched to a hard S so that the word is changed to ‘close’, but an additional -EZ syllable is inexplicably added to the end of the word so it becomes ‘closes.’ In China this is so common that you become attuned but it must cause all manner of confusion once students set off overseas and talk about the closes they wear! Another related TH pronunciation problem is demonstrated rather well in the video below (remember that Titanic is a very, very popular movie in China).
4.4 Pirate/parrot
I am not sure how I discovered this but many students pronounce these two words exactly the same. Since pirates are often pictured with a parrot, it is easy to create a classroom context in which students can practise distinguishing between these two words. A contextually related issue (semantic as well as pronunciation) is the difference between chief and thief.
%CODE 30%
I created quite a few resources like this several years ago and they are mostly still available at lauras-elt.v90.us/blog/ (I will update that resource when I have more time).
4.5 Technology
Not only is this word often spelled incorrectly or the wrong form used in students writing, but it is also frequently mispronounced. The student simply ends the word on the G sound which is extended in an awkward sounding manner and the Y is dropped. This makes it difficult to understand the word in connected speech
5. Uncountable Nouns
There are some uncountable nouns that are frequently but inaccurately made into countable nouns in both spoken and written English. I believe that dictionaries may be partly responsible for this because I have been shown dictionary entries showing that such usage is acceptable with no explanation that it is very infrequent or archaic. I simply list the words below; I certainly cannot think of any context in which these would be made countable unless in some very specific technical academic sense:
Research [researches X]
Knowledge [knowledges X]
Advice [advices X]
Information [informations X]
Evidence [evidences X]
6. Not Everybody is a Chinese Student: Undefined ‘we‘
This is a logical problem as much as a linguistic one. It is particularly problematic due to its impact on a student’s coherence in argumentative writing, which is often a requirement of academic English tests (e.g. IELTS Writing Task 2). The problem is that the writer (a Chinese student) assumes that the reader shares his/her perspective and that they are both part of some undefined collective. There are numerous examples of this issue and I suppose it is created through the deliberate rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party in Chinese classrooms in an attempt to make all Chinese citizens think the same way – a kind of truth by consensus. Perhaps this works in Chinese; however, when one is writing as an international student using English as an international language, it definitely does not work.
6.1 As we all know
Without defining ‘we‘ this lexical string is more or less meaningless. It is also extremely risky in an argumentative essay because the reader only has to think of one person who does not know whatever is being claimed and the argument is undermined. The same goes for the alternative version ‘as is known to all.’ In class, I use an example of an isolated tribe in the Amazon – such people probably have not heard of China let alone Chinese food. Therefore the claim ‘as we all know, Chinese food is delicious’ is nonsense. Furthermore, the use of this lexical chunk could be offensive because if the reader (a student’s lecturer perhaps) doesn’t know whatever is being claimed (maybe he/she doesn’t like Chinese food, for example), it is tantamount to the student calling his/her tutor ignorant. That isn’t a good way to get high marks!
6.2 People our Age
This is a complete failure to recognise that the reader might not be a peer. Take the example, ‘people our age all like hip-hop music.’ This is illogical on two counts:
1. without defining who is included in ‘our‘, it assumes a connection with the reader based on age and, as a middle-aged assessment consultant from the UK, I don’t feel such a connection to an 18 year-old Chinese student (and I guess that most teachers and examiners probably feel the same). Furthermore, where the paper is sent beyond the institution for marking, the reader will have no idea of the age of the writer so even if an ‘exclusive our’ is intended (i.e. not including the reader), it is still uninformative.
2. the claim that ‘all‘ people in this ill-defined age group like hip-hop is nonsense (see 6.1 above). This is an example of confusing ‘all, most, some‘.
Students are well advised to be extremely careful when using words like all, never, always, etc. in their writing as it usually makes for a very, very weak argument. Here are a couple of related articles I wrote on this topic:
7. Paraphrasing Prompts and Hot Topics
Another horrible and easily avoidable mistake that Chinese students seem intent on making even when warned not to is to use the first paragraph of an essay response to paraphrase the prompt. This is often done either by inserting or rearranging words to produce a grammatically incorrect version of the prompt, or by trying to fit the prompt into a pre-learnt template that is often marked by daft lexical chunks along the lines of ‘is a hot topic nowadays‘ or ‘is a topic of heated debate.’ The problem is that these approaches demonstrate a student’s lack of control of grammar or lack of awareness of appropriate vocabulary or, more commonly, both! If the student is writing in exam conditions, why would he/she want to waste valuable time demonstrating his/her weaknesses to the examiner right at the start of an essay? From the examiner’s perspective, it makes it easier to grade the work because from the very first paragraph, he/she can ignore all grades higher than near basic competence. If you take the popular IELTS test as an example, the student is effectively starting his/her essay with the statement ‘I am a band 5‘ – not a very skilful strategy for students aiming to study in an English-medium university!
Another very common “I’m an IELTS band 5” marker is often employed right at the start of an essay (and regularly with the errors identified in point 2 above) will be immediately recognisable to anybody who has marked student writing in China:
With the development of the [economic/technologic/social], …[Incorrect X]
With the development of [the economy/technology/the society], … [Correct √ but still a weak opening that marks the writer as dependent on prefabricated formulaic lexical sequences]
Here are a couple of articles I wrote on this topic:
Incidentally, if an essay question asks a student for a position (i.e. their opinion), simply stating that there are advantages and disadvantages is not really adequate as this is already implied in the question itself. No test-maker is daft enough to ask students to write an argumentative essay about a topic on which there is no space for argument. There are no rewards for simply extending the prompt over a couple of pages without actually engaging with it in any meaningful way.
Overall, my recommendation is for Chinese learners to read texts that were not produced in China. The resources available from reputable organisations like the British Council or the BBC are good choices.
As mentioned above, there are quite a few resources that I created still accessible on an archived version of my first website:
English Learning Resources at Laura’s ELT
