A Study Of The Usage Of To-v Pattern In High School Students’ Writing And The Teaching Strategies

Owning to its complexity and abundance,infinitive occurs frequently in English and its usage is difficult to master.Therefore,it is difficult and important for learners to learn infinitive.Infinitive contains two forms,namely,to-infinitive(with infinitive marker to)and bare infinitive(without infinitive to).This thesis only studiesto-infnitive which is used more frequently and only focuses on to-v pattern since to+be+v-ed occur rarely in Chinese senior high school students’ compositions.Pattern refers to a unit of meaning in winch form and meaning are combined.As there is no lexical category associated with infinitive marker to in Chinese language system,it is highly likely that Chinese learners encounter difficulties in to-v pattern learning and develop their own distinctive features in the usage of to-v pattern.Therefore,on the basis of Biber’s classification of to-v pattern acting as syntactic roles,the author decides to take to-v pattern in the composition of Chinese senior high school students as research objects to investigate the distinctive features of to-v pattern in comparison with native speakers,with the attempt to provide a useful guidance for English teaching and learning in China.To be specific,the three research questions of this research are as follows:(i)Compared with native English,what are the distribution features of to-v pattern in the writings by Chinese senior high school students?(ii)Compared with native English,what are the specific functions of to-v pattern in the writings by Chinese senior high school students?(iii)What strategies of to-v pattern can be developed for Chinese senior high-school English learners?Corpus-based approach is adopted in this research.The author chose sub-corpus ST2 of CLEC as observed corpus and LOCNESS as reference corpus and then chose 300 samples from the two corpora respectively.After these samples were analyzed in depth,the research data was obtained.In order to guarantee the objectivity and validness of research results,quantitative method and qualitative methods were both employed to analyze the data.The major findings of this research are as follows:(i)In comparison with native speakers,the distinctive distribution features of to-v pattern do exist in the compositions written by Chinese senior high school students.In general,from the perspective of the distribution of to-v pattern acting as syntactic roles,on the one hand,to-v pattern acting as adverbial is overused by Chinese senior high students.On the other hand,to-v pattern acting as part of noun phrase and part of adjective phrase is underused.(ii)In comparison with native speakers,the distinctive function features of to-v pattern do exist in the compositions written by Chinese senior high school students.When to-v pattern is used as part of noun phrase,Chinese learners are prone to use to-v pattern to modify the foregoing nouns and form verb-object construction while native speakers are inclined to use to-v pattern to explain the foregoing nouns and indicate nominalization.What’s more,Chinese learners neglect the modal meaning of abstract nouns+to-v pattern.When to-v pattern is used as adverbial,go/come+to-v pattern is overused by Chinese learners to show a purpose for a direction or location and phrases associated with making effort+to-v pattern are overused to show determination while native speakers hardly do.When to-v pattern is used as part of adjective phrase,Chinese learners tend to use emotional adjective+to-v pattern to show willingness or unwillingness.In order to express negotion,too+adj+to-v and not+adj+enough+to-v are overused by Chinese learners.However,native speakers have a tendency to use be+able+to-v to show ability frequently.When to-v pattern is used as direct object,want+to-v pattern is overused to show wanting by Chinese learners while seem+to-v pattern to mainfest conjecture is used most frequently by native speakers.Chinese learners are inclined to use human+begin+to-activity verbs to stress the movements performed by someone at the moment of speaking while native speakers tend to use the pattern of non-human+begin+to-v and human+begin+to-mental verbs.(iii)The teaching strategies of to-v pattern are provided from two dimensions for reference:(a)Teaching means of to-v pattern.Teachers should present students authentic materials from CLEC and LOCNESS,with the attempt to guide students compare and analyze the differences in the usage of to-v pattern used by Chinese learners and native speakers.Therefore,the usage of to-v pattern acting as different syntactic roles can be summarized systematically.(b)Teaching content of to-v pattern.Firstly,teachers should help students summarize the syntactic roles that to-v pattern act as and make them aware of the distribution features of to-v pattern.Secondly,this thesis’s research results can be taken as a reference.Teachers should guide students to pay more attention to the function and co-occurrence of to-v pattern in each category.Based on grammar functions,some certain categories with semantic functions are enriched.On the basis of the research results,a new teaching model based on pattern lay emphasis on patterns which are overused and underused.The patterns are summarized as follows.(a).Patterns that students overuse.(1)to-v pattern following a noun to form verb-object and modify foregoing nouns.(2)try one’s best+to-v pattern to show determination and go/come+to-v pattern to show purpose for a direction and a location.(3)emotional adjectives+to-v pattern to express attitudes of willingness or unwillingness(4)be+too+adj+to-v and be+not+adj+enough+to-v to show negotion(5)adjectives associated with "Difficult" Group occurring before to-v pattern to show the speaker’s negative attitudes towards the action indicated in the to-v pattern.(6)want+to-v pattern to show desire.(7)bgin+to-v pattern to stress the movements performed by someone at the moment of speaking.(b).Patterns that students underuse.(1)to-v pattern following nouns to indicate nominalization and explain foregoing nouns.(2)the modal meaning of abstract nouns+to-v pattern.(3)"be able to+to-v pattern" to show ability(4)adjectives associated with“Nice group" occurring before to-v pattern to show the speaker’s positive attitudes towards the action indicated in the to-v pattern.(5)seem+to-v pattern to mainfest conjecture.(6)non-human+begin+to-v and human+begin+to-mental verbs.