On The Obstacals And Countermeasures In Subjunctive Mood For Chinese EFL Learners

Reviewing on domestic researches over recent years, the comparative studybetween the learners language and native speakers language and corpus-based ErrorAnalysis are the dominance in the research field. However, the author of thisdissertation found the there were very few researches conducted on the EnglishSubjunctive Mood based on the native speaks corpus and the learners corpus. Inaddition, the Contrastive Analysis on Subjunctive Mood is almost the blank space.Nevertheless, such kind of researches is quite necessary. Acquisition of grammar hasever been a weak point for domestic EFL learners, particularly the acquisition of theSubjunctive Mood. Accordingly, the author picks out this grammatical item to carryout her research hoping to find a scientific, effective and reasonable approach inlearning and teaching it.Corpus-based research method was adopted in this study. The objects wereselected from the LOCNESS and the CLES respectively. Based on the theories ofinterlanguage, Error Analysis and Contrastive Analysis, the author conducted aresearch, quantitatively and qualitatively. This study was conducted by four steps: first,with the help of Wordsmith, the author made retrieval from the LOCNESS and CLECconcerning the Subjunctive Mood, then a manual selection and elimination was made.Second is to normalize the collected data and a comparative study was followed. Thethird step is to analyze the errors committed by Chinese EFL learners and the possiblecauses. In the fourth step, the author put forward the countermeasures---Task-basedLanguage Teaching Approach (TBLTA) for Chinese EFL learners to overcome theobstacle in use of Subjunctive Mood. It was proved by a four-semester teachingexperiment that the TBLTA was effective and reasonable compared with thetraditional PPP approach in terms of instruction of the SM.Wordsmith Tools and SPSS were employed to ensure the reliability of the data.There are two main findings: Firstly, concerning the application of SM, there is significant difference between the Chinese EFL learners and the native speaks;interlingual factors, intralingual factors and induced factors all contributed to theobstacles in the use of SM. Secondly, the effectiveness of the TBLTA in theinstruction of SM was proved, hoping to have some inspiration for the everydayEnglish teaching activities.There are some limitations for the objective and subjective reasons. First, suchresearch would benefit from a wider comparison of SM. Besides, the content of thelearner corpus was concerned only with the mid-level learners’ written production,excluding their oral production.Several suggestions for future research:(1) In the further study, more corporacould be employed to conduct much more complicated comparative studies in thisarea.(2) Experiments can be conducted to find whether it is effective when TBLTA isapplied to English beginners.