A Corpus-Based Error Analysis Of Chinese English Majors' Interlanguage: The Cases Of Do, Learn And Make

The study of Second Language Acquisition is generally divided into three stages: Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage analysis. To be more specific, CA compares L1 and TL, and EA compares IL and TL, while Interlanguage analysis can compare the Interlanguage of learners with different L1 backgrounds or Interlanguage with native speakers' language.CA has been criticized because it takes as its bases structuralism in linguistics and behaviorism in psychology. Besides, many of its predictions of learner difficulty are incorrect. Later CA is replaced by EA. EA analyzes errors by describing and comparing IL and TL, and it is one major method in diagnosing flaws of students' second/foreign language production. The EA in the traditional sense had its heyday in the 1970s, but because of its limitation in explaining learning problems, this method was no longer popular in the 1980s.At the turn of this century, a new method of SLA research based on computer technology—learner corpus research is gaining more and more popularity. A lot of influential learner corpora have been built both at home and abroad. In the early 1990s, EA regained wide attention with the establishment of corpora like ICLE (Jnternational Corpus of Learner English). The data for the present study come from SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners), which was built by scholars headed by Prof. Wen Qiufang at Nanjing University, Prof. Wang Lifei at Nanjing International Relations University and Dr. Liang Maocheng at Xuzhou Normal University and made public in July, 2005. This thesis chooses for the present study three high-frequency verbs 'do', 'learn' and 'make' to investigate the development of IL, and detailed analyses are also made of the use of the three verbs in 278 argumentative compositions of Year 1 to Year 4 English majors.In addition to Error analysis, this thesis adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis and contrastive analysis. Statistics are presented and analyses are made of data which are collected from the materials mentioned in the above corpus. The tool used for the study is Mike Scott's Wordsmith whose three major...