Corpus-based Analysis Of Common Syntactic Errors In Middle School Students’ English Compositions And Teaching Strategies

Looking at the current situation of middle school students’ English writing ability and level,We find the middle school students who lose too much marks in English writing due to syntactic errors.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the syntactic errors in depth.According to the classification of syntactic errors in Chinese Learner English Corpus,three types of common syntactic errors,namely run-on sentences,sentence fragments and structural deficiency,are selected to focus on the study.This research is based on corpus data to analyze,and aims to solve the following three problems:（1）What is the basic situation of the three types of syntactic errors such as run-on sentences,sentence fragments and structural defects in middle school students’ writing?（2）The overall correlation and differences between the three types of syntax errors and the different learning levels of middle school students?（3）What are the reasons for these three types of syntactic errors? What countermeasures should be adopted in teaching to make targeted improvements? By collecting English compositions of six-grade middle school students in a middle school in Shaoyang area,self-built middle school students’ writing corpus,about 50,000 words.Ultra Edit software is used to tag the run-on sentences,sentence fragments and structural deficiency in the corpus.According to the collected 480 pieces of English writing corpus,statistics found that the total of these three syntactic errors among the middle school students was 1080,of which 274 were run-on sentences,accounting for 25.37% of the total errors;147 were sentence fragments,accounting for13.61% of the total errors;and 659 were structural deficiency,accounting for the total61.02% of the errors.Studies have shown that the frequency of the two types of syntactic errors of run-on sentences and sentence fragments in writing by middle school students is negatively correlated with the learning level of middle school students as a whole,while the frequency of syntactic errors with structural defects is generally positively correlated with the learning level of middle school students.The three types of syntactic errors are not consistent.The number of run-on sentences errors is the largest in the first year of the junior high school,the number of sentence fragment errors occurs the most in the first year of high school,and the number of structural defects errors is the least in the first year of junior high.The main reasons for these three kinds of syntax errors are the negative transfer of mother tongue,learners’ over generalization and incomplete application of rules,and traditional writing teaching methods under test-oriented education.In response to the above situation,this article puts forward teaching strategies such as emphasizing the positive and negative influence of mother tongue in second language acquisition,enriching English writing teaching with computer technology and interactive teaching to create a harmonious teacher-student relationship.The problem in this study is that although we have made some analysis and research on the three syntactic errors,but because the number of corpus involved in this study is relatively large,it also spans six student groups in the middle school,so the study failed to take into account with some detailed analysis,in the future we will conduct a more in-depth and meticulous inquiry into this issue.