An Analys Is Of The Common Errors In Senior-high-school Students’ Use Of English Tenses

In our country, the English tenses have always been a key and difficult point for most Chinese EFL learners, especially for most high school students. Over the last decades, the tense examination has been occupied a proportion in the National College Entrance Examination. We can easily find its test point in multiple choice questions, passage correction and composition. The importance of tense study in English deserves our attention. While, because of the distinct differences in the categories of temporality between Chinese and English, Chinese learners have committed tense errors commonly. According to the collected data, most of the researches chose CLEC corpus to collect materials, and took intermediate or advanced learners, such as college non-English or English majors as the subjects; while on the contrary, few took senior high school students, who may use tense commonly and frequently, as the subjects. So, at the current tense-teaching background, it is meaningful to analyze the common errors in senior-high-school students’use of English tenses.This thesis, with Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (IL) theory as its theoretical guidance, the subjects are200students from two senior high Schools in Ji Nan of Shandong Province, who are randomly selected from four classes of senior two and three. By the multiple-choice tense test, the Chinese-English tense translation test and the interview to collect data. Meanwhile, I used the method of combining qualitative and quantitative study to investigate and analyze the typical characteristics and causes of tense errors among different materials.The results show that:in the multiple-choice tense test, tenses were mistaken used seriously among them. Among these tenses errors, simple past tense, present perfect and past perfect tense have a relative high error and mistaken use frequency. It’s worthwhile to note that the three forms of simple tense (the simple present tense, the simple future tense and the simple past tense) also have a higher error frequency; in the Chinese-English tense translation test, the Chinese aspect markers "了、着、在、过”had a crucial effect on acquiring the English tense and aspect by Chinese high school students. Causes of tense errors are complicated and multiple, among them, interlingual errors (LI interference) and intralingual errors (target language causes) are main causes, other causes of errors (teaching and individual aspects) also attribute to tense errors. Besides, through the interview, we find that tense teaching and learning in high schools are still in a time-consuming and low efficiency situation.Based on the above study, the author proposes corresponding suggestions from several aspects, including minimizing the negative influence of Chinese temporality, raising students’awareness and sensitivity of tense, etc.Hopefully, the study will be valuable and helpful to both English tense teaching and learning in high schools.