Omission Errors In The Composition Of Chinese EFL Learners

The purpose of the present research paper was to investigate the omission phenomenon that exists among Chinese ESL (English as a Second Language) learners by making use of the data retrieved from CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) , intending to find the omission patterns and to improve ESL teaching based of the result of this research.So far there have been a large quantity of corpus-based researches concerning Chinese ESL learners' lingual errors, but most of them are restricted to general analysis or to the research targeting vocabular errors while there are very few omission-oriented researches. This present thesis, by making good use of the modern computer and corpus-retrieving technology, retrieved a great many cases from CLEC and analyzed these data - the errors made by Chinese ESL students at both higher and lower levels of English proficiency and found the omission patterns characterized by them. It mainly deals with the omission phenomenon by integrating Error Analysis (EA) and the theory of interlanguage with the corpus-based approach.This research was an empirical one. All data were collected from CLEC, SPSS was used to make the statistical analysis and Excel was utilized to make the charts. Based on the results of the comprehensive analysis, a tentative conclusion was addressed, which will be instructive for the EFL teaching and further research in this field.It used the errors in different parts of speech as the cut-in point, retrieved data, classified and analyzed them by retagging them first. Finally the paper chose several words, which are in common use but were seriously omitted and 'underused', as the object of this research. It was designed to find the omission patterns of these words and the causes for theses errors so that effective measures can be taken.This present research as well as the results of other studies have confirmed that negative transfer contributes much to omission errors but not the only cause; and that the fossilization phenomenon is temporary and therefore the omission errors can be...