A Contrastive Analysis of –ing and –ndo for L2 Learning

Abstract

With the deep cooperation between China and Spanish speaking countries, Spanish, the third widely spoken language in the world, is badly needed. Now many students are learning Spanish but they cannot handle the use of the gerund leading to their failure to acquire this target language. The thesis is focused on the Spanish gerund, which has no representation of features such as persons, number and tense. This paper elaborately analyzes the various functions of the gerund and also explains the characteristics of the gerund phrases. Our mother tongue, Chinese, has sparse morphological devices, which leads to the difficulties in studying the gerund. Drawing on linguistic Contrastive Analysis, this thesis is focused on the comparison between English and Spanish. The English –ing is explained in detail in the thesis and the concept of English gerund and present participle is distinguished. There are many similarities between English and Spanish. So after knowing the English –ing, the students can ask for help from English.