A Corpus-based Study Of Primary Auxiliary Verbs In English Majors’Writings

Auxiliaries are both indispensable and problematic for language learners. Auxiliaries play an important role in foreign language learning and second language acquisition, so the correct use of English auxiliaries becomes an essential skill for language learners. Up till now, many studies have investigated learners’difficulty with auxiliaries. However, these studies mainly investigate Chinese auxiliaries, classification of English auxiliaries, English modal auxiliaries. Little studies concerning auxiliary errors made by English majors in their writings. Therefore, this study is designed to investigate auxiliary errors by Chinese English majors. This study is a corpus-based study.Auxiliaries can be divided into many categories. According to the standard admitted by most researchers in the field of English grammar—the "NICE"(abbreviation of negation, inversion, code, and emphatic) features (Palmer,1988; Quirk,1985; Warner,1993), auxiliaries can be categorized into three groups:primary auxiliaries, central modal auxiliaries and marginal modal auxiliaries. The present study is designed to find out primary auxiliary errors in English majors’writings. It is aimed at exploring what kind of errors is committed in using auxiliaries and the frequency of these auxiliary errors in English majors’writings of the four grades. The similarities and differences of primary auxiliary errors among students of the four grades were also studied. Possible causes of these errors were explored.The corpus used in this study is sub-corpus WECCL2.0(Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners2.0) of SWECCL2.0(Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners2.0). Under the help of Sub-corpus Generator, two hundred essays were randomly selected for study with fifty pieces for each grade. Counting and identification of primary auxiliary errors were made under the help of PatCount and Colligator. As for primary auxiliary errors in these essays, major findings are as follows:(1) The frequency of auxiliary usage and auxiliary errors of the students in the four grades are similar. Students in Grade Four have a better acquisition of primary auxiliary.(2) Major errors committed by English majors are:third person singular errors, tense errors and subject-verb agreement errors.(3) Possible causes of these errors are first language interference, overgeneralization in intralingual errors, ignorance of primary auxiliary collocation constructions, students’ incomplete mastery of rules as well as carelessness.Suggestions for auxiliary learning and teaching are put forward. First, teachers can employ corpus to facilitate EFL teaching. Then, teachers and learners can compare Chinese auxiliary and English auxiliary to promote auxiliary teaching and learning. Last, learners can employ error analysis to facilitate auxiliary learning.