A Corpus-based Analysis Of Redundancy Errors In English Writings By Chinese EFL Learners

Redundancy is a concept in information theory initiated by Shannon (1949). It refers to excess information in communication, that is, the amount of information that exceeds the minimum amount of information which is needed to guarantee reasonable understanding. Redundancy is a prevailing phenomenon in language, both in the language system and people's daily communication.According to the theory of Error Analysis, Interlanguage Theory and Corpus Linguistics, the present study focuses on the redundancy occurred in the English writings of Chinese EFL learners, specifically on the levels of lexical error, grammatical error and discourse error. Unlike the previous researches which are primarily conducted by experimental method, the present study is a corpus-based study of the errors committed by Chinese EFL learners on redundancy. CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) is the corpus used in the study. From the corpus, four sub-corpora (st3—st6) of Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels are chosen as the subjects.Based on data obtained from CLEC by computer and on the manual data-analysis, the present study tries to find out the tendency and distribution of redundancy at different English proficiency levels, and tries to find out the causes of the three types of redundancy errors. The following findings are obtained in the present study: 1) the grammatical redundancy is prominent in the three types of redundancy errors committed by Chinese EFL learners, takes over half amount of the total; 2) the discourse redundancy takes the smallest amount in the three types; 3) with the improvement of English proficiency, the redundancy frequency becomes lower; 4) the English majors (st5-st6) made less redundancy errors that non-English majors (st3-st4). The author further traces the source of each sub-type, finding out grammatical redundancy errors account the largest proportion, which is mainly caused by intralingual factors, while interlingual influences are the major causes of lexical errors and discourse errors. The implication of the findings for Chinese EFL learners are also discussed in the study.