Error Analysis Of The Present Perfect In Chinese Students' English Writings

The present perfect has been important and difficult in English grammar because the system of tense/aspect is totally different from that in Chinese. The English verbs, which serve as predicates, have many inflections concerning tense/aspect. In addition, the constructions are corresponding between main clause and subordinate clause, and between sentences with repect to tense/aspect. It is a new language knowledge for Chinese students whose L1 is Chinese in which the manifestation of grammatical features doesn't rely on the inflections of verbs. The concept of time is expressed through the tense/aspect in English, which don't exist in Chinese. Chinese mainly employ such adverbs as"曾经,正在,已经,将要"or such form words as"了,着,过"to form adverbial and complement respectively so as to express the concept of time. The Chinese verbs themselves don't have any inflections. As far as the present perfect is concerned, it hasn't a counterpart in Chinese. The non-corresponding in the syntactic construction will unavoidably interfere with the target-language learning. Therefore the author decided to make an error analysis of the present perfect in Chinese students'English writings with advanced corpus instruments.The present study is based on Chinese Learner English Corpus and has adopted a quantitative and qualitative methodology. First, the author picked out all the present perfect errors (358) out of all the tense errors (2971) manually(before normalization). Then, the author retagged all the present perfect errors according to their error types with a tagging system, which was designed by the author himself. Next, the author gave an overview of the present perfect errors committed by different levels of students and made a longitudinal analysis between some sub-corpora which are comparable.The present study has the following major findings: First, learners of lower levels committed more present perfect errors than advanced learners at large. St2 (high school students) committed the most present perfect errors. St4 (CET-6 level college students) committed fewer errors than St3 (CET-4 level college students). St6 (higher-grade English majors) committed fewer errors than St5 (lower-grade English majors). There are also exceptions. For example, St6 students commmitted more errors than St4. This can be traced back to the source difference of each subcorpus. Second, there are far more tense-confusion errors than non-target like form errors. What is more, the substitution of past participle with the original form of a verb is outstanding among the non-target like form errors. Third, the most confusing tenses with the present perfect are the simple past, the past perfect and the simple present according to the frequency.It is also found that most of the present perfect errors are caused by L1 transfer. The author explained how the L1 tranfer occurs in present perfect errors from two perspectives: Connectionism and MDH combined with some examples. Finally, the author pointed out that the teaching of the present perfect must focus on the difficulties of different levels of students. What is more, we should face up to the influence of L1 and enlarge the input, especially with a concrete context, in order to reduce the adverse effects of L1.In addition, English teachers are encouraged to design some situational exercises to help students distinguish the present perfect from other tenses as far as the situation is concerned. When assigning writing tasks, free-topic compositions are proved to be more helpful for students to practice different types of tenses in their writings than topic-set compositions.