A Corpus Study Of Two Types Of Errors: Absence And Redundancy Committed By Chinese EFL Learners

A Corpus Study of Two Types of Errors: Absence and Redundancy Committed by Chinese EFL LearnersBased on the theory of IL, the present study investigates two types of errors: absence and redundancy. This study investigates the absence and redundancy patterns characterized by Chinese EFL learners. Corpus approach is adopted in the present study. CLEC is the corpus we used. From the corpus, three groups of EFL learners at different EFL proficiency are chosen as our subjects. The following findings are obtained in the present study: 1). English proficiency level is inversely proportional to the commitment of absence and redundancy. The higher English proficiency level one has, the less likely will he commit the two types of errors: absence and redundancy of a same word, and vice versa. 2). Absence and redundancy are correlated. They are in direct proportion. When a word is more possible to be absent, it is also more likely to be redundant, and vice versa. The present study also investigates the factors behind absence and redundancy including L1- dependent factors, L2- related factors, cognitive factors and factors related to teaching strategies and explains the occurrence of absence and redundancy cognitively. The implications of the findings for EFL teaching in China are also discussed in the study.