Error Analysis On English Existential Sentences

Language teachers are inevitably confronted with various production errors made by students in the course of teaching. With the development of linguistics, applied linguistics, physiology and other relevant subjects, people's attitude toward error changed greatly. In the 1950s and 1960s, Contrastive Analysis (CA) was widely employed to analyze learners' errors. However, it is not always true that difference between first language (L1) and target language (TL) leads to errors through interference, nor is it true that the L1 is the sole source of error. It causes another way of analysis: Error Analysis comes into being. Error Analysis (EA) examines the actual errors produced by the learner in the TL. It sees errors as a natural phenomenon that inevitably occurs when learning a first or second language before correct knowledge is acquired and completely internalized. EA has been closely related with language teaching from the very beginning and has been a major concern of researchers.The present research is an error analysis on English there-be construction among Chinese learners.Studies on there-be or existential construction are now in large quantities, but almost all of them focus on either the language itself or the interpretation of the structure in its own right instead of trying to study there-be structure from the perspective of learners' IL. Owing to the "easy-to-learn" quality of there-be, a tendency of overuse and consequently misuse of this structure can be identified among Chinese learners. Hence, it is highly necessary to make an error analysis of there-be structure based on the language data collected from the Chinese learners and this is what the present study are trying to do.Students of three different grades are given a language test on the use of there-be construction, and then the test results are presented and analyzed.The major error types detected in students' production are: disagreement, there+have/there be+have and existential pseudo-relatives. The errors made by the students in the three levels decline not only in number but in type as well. Lastly, first...