A Corpus-based Study Of Absence Errors In Non-English Majors’ Writings

As a branch of applied linguistics, Error Analysis (EA) plays an important role insecond language learning and teaching. It can help researchers understand the learningprocess of learners and the strategies they apply. And it can help teachers realize thecommon characteristics shared by language learners, and then teachers can give somegroup directions and promote teaching. Furthermore, it can help learners gain someinsights into the difficulties they have in their learning process, improve their methodsof study and increase their academic achievements.The present study is designed to analyze the absence errors committed bynon-English majors. It tries to explore the absence categories and their distribution,seek causes of the absent errors, and provide some suggestions for the teaching andlearning of College English writings.The researcher extracted1502absence errors from the two sub-corpora st3andst4of Chinese learner English Corpus (CLEC), including965from st3, and537fromst4. According to the parts of speech of the absent words, these absence errors wereclassified into9categories and15sub-categories. After counting the number of thetimes of absence, the researcher found five absence sub-categories: prepositions,be-verbs, definite articles, conjunctions and nouns. After using the correlation testsand chi-square tests, the researcher found that there is no significant differencebetween the distribution of absence categories in st3and that in st4, and there is alsono significant difference between the distributions of sub-categories between them.In addition, the researcher gave a writing task to50non-English majors fromBeijing University of Technology (BJUT), and then analyzed each student’scomposition and showed him the absence errors that he had committed in hiscomposition, and finally had a brief interview with each student. Based on the theoryof EA and the results of the interviews, the researcher found that the causes ofnon-English majors’ absence errors were interlingual factor, i.e. the negative transferof Chinese, intralingual factors, such as the complexity of English linguistic rules,learners’ learning strategies, including learners’ incomplete mastery of linguistic rules,overgeneralization of rules, ignorance of rule restrictions, insufficient input, teachers’teaching strategies, and compound and ambiguous factors.Finally, the present study provided some suggestions on college English writing and teaching. First, teachers should pay attention to the teaching of grammatical rulesof the most frequently absent parts of speech, especially those different from Chinesegrammatical rules, helping students get rid of the negative transfer of Chinese. Second,teachers should let students read more pure English, increasing the input of Englishlanguage, and therefore students can produce correct English language. Third,teachers should improve the learners’motivation and foster their good writing habits.