A Corpus-based Study On The Misuse Of Word Class Of Noun In Chinese Learners Of English

Word class, as a very important linguistic element in every human language, plays a vital role in language usage. Not only does it determine the language correctness, but also it can be taken as a yardstick of foreign language learners' proficiency level. English shares much in common with Chinese concerning word class. According to the theories of interlanguage and first language transfer in the scope of second language acquisition, the construction and usage of word class in Chinese will have a strong impact on the Chinese learners' mastery of English word class.As a representative of interlanguage corpus, the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) provides users with tag of word class error (wd2) and the author will make a tentative analysis on the word class error committed by the three sample groups (St2, St3 and St4). First from a horizontal perspective, it shows that the influence of first language negative transfer, which leads to the fact that Chinese learners of English, are greatly interfered and confined by the Chinese word class rules. Word class error has a high frequency in English learning. Then from a vertical perspective, it shows that there is no much differentiation in the three sample groups on the word class error, indicating its universality among Chinese learners and the difficulty in overcoming it. Through the software Myfinder, all the errors with the wd2 tag can be sorted out. After classifying and analyzing the errors, the author found that Chinese learners commit most errors of word class of noun, so the word class of noun will be chosen as the focus of analysis in attempts to explore certain developmental patterns in Chinese learners. In the course of research, several features of Chinese learners' learning of word class of noun have been discovered:1) Subject to the first language negative transfer, Chinese learners often mix noun with adjective and verb indiscriminately and most of the errors can be attributed to its impact.2) In Chinese learners' learning process, they make use of learning strategies tocompensate for their linguistic incompetence, which inevitably results in varieties of errors, yet taken as a normal phenomenon in the development of interlanguage.3) There is a great similarity in the three sample groups. The word class error does not decrease with the increase of learners' proficiency level.It is a significant experiment to analyze the error of word class of noun in Chinese Learner English Corpus and its results can be instructive to our English teaching and learning in the following aspects:1) There is much space for improvement in English teaching in Chinese universities and colleges. The present test form leads to Chinese learners' over-dependence on the options provided by the test paper. It is necessary to make changes to the test form2) Chinese learners themselves should shift from traditional test-oriented learning to the practical usage of English.3) With the development of corpus concordancing tools and the construction of large machine-readable corpora, corpus linguistics puts forth a new method in foreign language research and learning and makes self-directed learning available.