A Corpus-based Study On Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Causal Phrasal Prepositions

Causality plays a significant role in written English, however, causal phrasal prepositions (CPPs) which used in our daily life was neglected in general. In order to make an overall investigation of Chinese EFL learners, contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) and computer-aided error analysis (CEA) are jointly carried out in this study. The data for analysis come from two corpora: Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and BNC1 generated from British National Corpus (BNC). The instrument used here is Wordsmith 3.0 and Sara-32 0.98 respectively for each corpus.This paper reports a corpus-based contrastive study on the use of CPPs between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers. The author endeavors to find the use of causality among non-native speakers and explores the features or variations of Chinese EFL learners in comparison with the natives. Through comparison on CPPs, general Chinese EFL learners'formula and tendency in use of those prepositions may generate accordingly. In addition, within CLEC, certain types of common errors or misuses were discussed, and the causes or factors underlying these errors were also taken into account. The focus was on the interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners, CPPs in particular. Statistics in the present study show that CPPs was used with certain preferences. Chinese students use only eight of sixteen, which means they tend to underuse some of them for certain reasons. On the contrary, Chinese EFL learners'use of CPPs evidently lacked of variety, which means compared with native learner, within little variety certain CPPs was overused. In conclusion, the misuses of the top-four CPPs from CLEC could result from language transfer, avoidance, training strategies, and overgeneralization, etc. At last, limitations of this study and pedagogic implications are also taken into consideration in the hope of bringing some insights to further researches.