Error Analysis Of Verb "BE" In English Compositions Of High School Students

Verb “be” is a complicated word serving both as copular verb and auxiliary verb.As a main verb, verb “be” is the most important one which links the subject with asubject predicative or an obligatory adverbial. As an auxiliary verb, verb “be” marksprogressive aspect and passive voice. Chinese students learn verb “be” at thebeginning of learning English, they take verb “be” as an easy grammar to master andlook down upon it. However, verb “be” is used frequently and errors are committed.Researchers at home and abroad have studied this word in different angles and foundout it is inevitable to find errors of verb “be” and tried to explain the reasons thatcaused the errors.Based upon the error framework by Liu Shaolong (2000) and Wang Junfeng(2007), this study tries to explore the errors of verb “be” high school students tend tocommit in their English writings and the reasons causing the errors in their Englishwritings.206compositions are collected written by Senior1,2and3in a Nan changhigh school. The errors of verb “be” are divided into four categories, they are errors ofagreement, errors of tense, ellipsis of verb “be” and redundancy of verb “be”. Thesubdivisions are based on the errors students really made in their compositions.The major findings according to the data analysis are as follows: Four categoriesof errors of verb “be” are committed in the compositions, there are errors of agreement,errors of tense, redundancy of verb “be” and ellipsis of verb “be”. Among them, thepercentage of tense error is much higher than that of the other three kinds of errors.The error of agreement is the least error that students committed in their compositions.The numbers of errors of ellipsis and redundancy are almost same, which are in thesecond and third place.The specific situations of each kind of errors are summarized as follows:1) In terms of tense error, Senior2made the most errors among three grades. Present tenseis misused by students in place of past tense in their compositions. Overgeneralizationis applied to the wrong situations, as in Chinese there is no inflection of words toindicate tense and rules of present tense are learned before that of past tense.2) Senior2made more ellipsis errors than Senior1and3. More copular verbs “be” are omittedthan auxiliary verbs “be”. When the complement is adjective phrases, students arelikely to omit copular verb “be”, especially in Senior2and3. The situation thatstudents omit auxiliary verb “be” in progressive aspect and passive voice happens lessand less from Senior1to Senior3.3) As for redundancy errors, Senior2made theleast redundancy error while Senior3made the most. Students in all the three gradestend to add verb “be” before verb, for students overgeneralize the rules of verb “be”,treating verb “be” as a tense marker which can not be omitted even if there is a verbshowing the tense of the sentence.4) The tendency of agreement errors decreases fromSenior1to Senior3. Most agreement errors are made when plural countable noun isused as subject due to the transfer of mother tongue.Errors of verb “be” should be studied by researchers, teachers and studentsthemselves. Teachers should be able to predicate the difficult points of verb “be” anderrors students tend to commit and try to help students break through. Students shouldpay more attention to verb “be” and keep the differences between English and Chinesein mind.