A Corpus-based Study On Misuse Of Parts Of Speech By Chinese English Learners

Misuse of parts of speech is one type of errors frequently occurring in ChineseEnglish learners'writing. However, till now the error-proneness of parts of speechby Chinese English learners has been attached very little attention. Based on the EAtheory, the present paper aims to throw some light on the empirical study of misuseof parts of speech. By analyzing the typical patterns of misuse of parts of speechcharacterized by Chinese English learners, we hope the data-driven study willcontribute to English language teaching and English textbook compiling in China.Corpus approach is adopted in the present study. CLEC (Chinese LearnerEnglish Corpus) is the corpus we used. We carefully investigate 2490 misuse of partsof speech tagged as wd2 in the five sub-corpora. The following findings areobtained:1) Misuse of parts of speech is widespread among the five groups of ChineseEnglish learners at various proficiency levels. Non-English major college studentsmisuse parts of speech most frequently. The senior high school students'relativelylower occurrence of misuse of parts of speech cannot suggest that they havemastered the rules of parts of speech because their vocabulary is limited. While highproficiency learners, English major college students have the lowest frequency inalmost every category of misuse of parts of speech.2) Misuse of parts of speech in CLEC can be generally classified into sixcategories. They are misuse of noun, misuse of verb, misuse of adjective, misuse ofadverb, misuse of preposition and misuse of gerund. Each category of misuse ofparts of speech can be specifically classified into several types.3) Among the six categories of misuse of parts of speech, misuse of adjectivesoccurs most frequently in each of the five sub-corpora.4) Misuse of parts of speech occurs more frequently in the following words:different, important, happy, like, success, developing, economic and social.The present study also investigates the sources of misuse of parts of speech,including L1-dependent factors, L2-related factors and cognitive factors. Theimplications of the findings for ELT in China are also discussed in the study.