Corpus Based Error Analysis Of The Use Of English Articles By Chinese College Students

The English article system (a, the and ?) is one of the most difficult grammatical elements to learn and to use for Chinese students whose language doesn't have the articles. There have been a large number of studies concerning the English article system, ranging from its acquisition, function, and pedagogy to variation, etc. Native Chinese scholars and overseas researchers have contributed to the understanding of this elusory and complex system from different perspectives. The Chinese scholars have paid much of their attention to the general description of how the English article system is used. These researchers often concentrate on one specific aspect of article usage by providing lists of example plus brief explanations. Their researches are not empirical in nature. Therefore, the researcher carries on an empirical study to make clear the errors committed by Chinese college students and to find out the factors behind them.Based on the EA theory, the present paper aims to throw some light on the empirical study of misuse of articles. By analyzing the typical patterns of misuse of articles characterized by Chinese college students, we hope the data-driven study will contribute to English language teaching in China.Corpus approach is adopted in the present study. CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) is the corpus we used. We carefully investigate misuse of articles in the sub-corpus ST3 of CLEC. The following findings are obtained:1) Misuse of articles is widespread among the sub-corpus ST3 of CLEC2) Misuse of articles in the sub-corpus ST3 of CLEC can be generally classified into three categories. They are omission of an article, oversuppliance of an article and article confusion of a/an, a/the and an/the.3) The most frequently occurring error type is omission: this tendency is likely to have been caused by direct interference from the article-less Chinese language.4) Among the category of ATC, a/an confusion occurs most frequently.The present study also investigates the sources of misuse of articles, including L1-dependent factors, L2-related factors and the article semantics. The implications of the findings for ELT in China are also discussed.