Error Analysis On The Use Of Verbs In Senior High School Students’ English Continuation Writing

With the reform of China’s education system and the implementation of the new college entrance examination system,English Continuation Writing has become a new type of college entrance examination writing question.As a form of expression of language output,English Continuation Writing not only requires students to have strong comprehension ability,but also examines students’ vocabulary base and grammar application ability.Verbs are the basic components of English sentences,and they are also the error-prone points in students’ writing.Therefore,this study explores the verb usage errors in high school students’ English Continuation Writing to help teachers improve their teaching skills,eliminate the main obstacles in students’ writing,and enhance students’ English writing proficiency.Based on Error Analysis Theory and Interlanguage Theory,this study takes 240 compositions of English Continuation Writing of senior high school students in Changyang county,Yichang city,Hubei province,codes the verb errors in the samples according to the classification of verb errors in Corpus-based Analysis of Chinese Learner English,and uses Ant Conc.4.2.0 corpus retrieval tool to calculate and analyze the verb usage errors.Finally,through a questionnaire survey of 120 students and interviews with 9 English teachers in the school,the following two questions are planned to be answered:(1)What types of verb errors do senior high school students make in English Continuation Writing and how often do they occur?(2)What are the reasons for misusing the verbs in English Continuation Writing?The survey finds that the frequency of verb usage errors in senior high school students’ English Continuation Writing from high to low is: tense error,other errors,fixed phrase error,non-finite error,voice error,modal verb error,subject-predicate consistency error,transitivity error,and finite verb error.In addition,there are subjective and objective reasons for students’ errors in the use of verbs in Continuation Writing.The subjective reasons mainly include the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue,intralingual induction,students’ writing attitude and learning strategies;The objective reasons mainly consist of genre restrictions on English Continuation Writing and the influence of teachers’ teaching methods.Based on the above survey findings,this paper puts forward four suggestions for teaching improvement:(1)comparing the differences between English and Chinese verbs,reducing the negative transfer of mother tongue,(2)innovating verb teaching methods,optimizing the guidance of grammar study,(3)stimulating students’ interest in writing,teaching the strategies of English Continuation Writing,and(4)refining verb review guidance,emphasizing the combination of individual and collective evaluations.