Towards A Better Presentation Of Notional Verb Error Warning Notes In ECLDs

Errors are unavoidable in the process of learning a foreign language. As theimportant tools for Chinese EFL learners to learn English, English-Chinese Learner’sDictionaries should warn against the errors frequently made by Chinese EFL learnersto prevent them from making the similar errors again. Therefore, the focus of thisthesis is how to present the error warning notes effectively in ECLDs.Notional verbs are chosen to be studied in this thesis, because they are large inquantity and complicated in usage and notional verb errors rank first among all theword classes’ errors made by Chinese EFL learners. Focusing on the analysis of thenotional verb errors, this study carries out two empirical studies to explore a betterpresentation of notional verb error notes in ECLDs. Firstly, the common notional verberrors made by Chinese EFL learners are explored by searching the corpus CLEC andother reference materials. Four types of common notional verb errors are found out:verb pattern errors, verb and noun collocation errors, substitution errors andredundancy errors. Secondly, a survey of the error warning notes in four Englishlearner’s dictionaries is conducted to check the location of the error warning notes, thespecific ways of presenting the error warning notes and the types of errors presentedin the error warning notes. The survey shows that each of the dictionaries has itsmerits and demerits. For Chinese EFL learners, the fundamental drawback of the errorwarning notes in these dictionaries lies in that the errors warned against in these notesare not the ones peculiar to Chinese EFL learners.Based on the above analysis, the thesis puts forward the specific ways to improvethe presentation of the notional verb error warning notes in ECLDs. The proceduresare introduced for presenting the error warning information, and some samples of thenotional verb error warning notes are given.