Analysis Of English-Transitive-Verb Errors By Senior High School Students

Transitive verbs are a frequently seen part of verbs but special in that such verbs generally have to take objects, which are rather complex occasionally. Because of these, it is not surprising that second language learners make errors in acquiring them. In addition, the objects of such verbs are divergent and flexible, so Chinese learners of English tend to find it hard to know them very well, which just attests the fact that it is noteworthy to do research into transitive verbs.This paper attempts to investigate the errors of transitive verbs by senior high school students and their causes in the hope that this research may throw new light on transitive verbs which senior high school students in China learn.As mentioned above, the uses and categories of verbs is rich and complex, and so are transitive verbs, an important branch of verbs; on account of this, generally, with students using transitive verbs, it is not avoidable to make errors.This thesis will make an attempt to seek the answers to the following questions:1 In what respects do senior high school students tend to commit errors while using transitive verbs?2 Why do such errors emerge? 3 What are teachers supposed to do?In order to solve these problems, the author selected a whole class of one senior middle school as subjects by means of translation exercises and questionnaires. After analysis of the data from the subjects, the findings are provided as follows:1. Language transfer does exist in learning transitive verbs.2. Consciousness of English grammatical structures needs developing.3. The extent to which the same type of transitive verbs is acquired is markedly different for this or that reason in some cases.4. Of all the types of transitive verbs, the transitive verbs with the meaning of "causing someone to have some kind of feelings" make it for senior middle school students the most difficult to learn.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is about the brief introduction of the research scope and the research questions and then its significance.Chapter 2 is centered upon the theories, the definitions and development of the terms connected to this thesis and also the previous researches of some of them.Chapter 3 is the detailed introduction of the research methodology, including research questions, subjects, instruments, which are made up of translation exercises and questionnaires, and the procedure and data collection regarding this research..Chapter 4 treats of analysis of the data elicited from the subjects and explains why errors turn up; then, the findings from translation exercises and questionnaires are provided. Last, the thesis is under in-depth discussion.Chapter 5, the last chapter, arrives at the conclusion of the study, constituted of the summary, pedagogical implications and limitations of the thesis, and the suggestions for further research.