A Corpus-based Research On The Acquisition Of English Subjunctive Mood By Chinese EFL Learners

The grammar learning remains a loophole for L2 learners, among which, the acquisition of the subjunctive mood is a typical grammatical difficulty and focus. So the author of this thesis attempts to make an investigation into the acquisition of English subjunctive mood, with a wish to provide some suggestions to its teaching and learning.Supported by the theory of interlanguage, EA, and CIA, the corpus-based approach is adopted in present study in order to make a quantitative and qualitative research on the basis of the authentic data collecting from the BNC and CLEC.The research is conducted from three steps:First, the determination of the object of study, then the data collection, concordancing, manual selection and elimination; next, the comparative analysis on the two corpora; and then comes to the error analysis of the subjunctive mood by Chinese EFL learners. The Concordance tool employed here is Wordsmith Tool, and other tools and computing methods such as the Log-likelihood Calculator and the Chi-square Test are also utilized.The results show that, there is significant difference in the use of English subjunctive mood between the native speakers and Chinese EFL learners. Meanwhile, the discrepancy also exists among the learners with different English proficiency. The possible causes contributing to the learners'errors involve the interlingual and intralingual factors, as well as the induced factors.