Error Analysis Of English Majors' Oral English: A Corpus-Based Study

Errors cannot be avoided in the process of English learning. Systematic analysis to these errors can reveal the learners'learning patterns which can inspire English learning and help learners correct their errors. Under the guidance of error analysis (EA) theory, the author chose 120 test takers'recordings and their converted texts as the data. Patcount software and Excel are adopted for data analysis. Error taxonomy in this study is mainly based on the taxonomies of Cai Longquan and Dai Weidong (2001) and C. James (2001).Firstly, the current situation of English majors' oral English was analyzed. Next, the main errors made by English majors were classified and summarized. And then, the main possible sources of these errors are discussed. Finally, the author compared errors between TEM-4 and TEM-8 test takers from several aspects such as error types and error frequency.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) The study reveals that the test takers'average error rate is 37.26%. In other words, there are about three to four errors in every ten sentences. While communicative purpose is basically achieved because some errors do not affect the test takers' discourse meanings too much on the whole.(2) The errors committed by these English majors in oral English can be classified into two general types:component-level errors and discourse-level errors. As for the component-level errors, it falls into four sub-types:phonological errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors and syntactical errors. Besides, each of these errors has their own sub-types. The discourse-level errors can be further divided into errors of conjunction, reference errors and coherence errors. These types of errors can be arranged as follows according to error numbers:grammatical errors, phonological errors, syntactical errors, lexical errors, errors in conjunctions, reference errors and coherence errors.(3) Error distributions and the frequency distributions of both TEM-8 and TEM-4 test takers are basically similar; while TEM-8 Oral Test students'oral English are more fluent than that of TEM-4 students. Generally speaking, TEM-8 Oral Test students have significant advantage over TEM-4 Oral Test students in terms of grammatical errors, syntactical errors, discourse-level errors, etc, which indicates that they have really progressed after longer training. Though TEM-8 test takers commit fewer errors in many of the error types, error obstinacy exists.(4) These errors are caused by several possible reasons. Chinese phonological system and pronunciation of some dialects in China lead to phonological errors. Failure in grasping the basic English knowledge results in some lexical and grammatical errors. Differences in syntactical structures, tense, voice and morphology between English and Chinese are the main sources for syntactical errors and some grammatical errors. While discourse-level errors are primarily due to different modes of thinking between China and the western world, and lacking of authentic environment in English. Excessive nervousness and anxiety during the oral tests are also significant sources of these errors.It should be pointed out that this study has some limitations. For example, this study only chose the impromptu speech tasks in SECCL to research, errors classification is, to some extent, unavoidably affected by the author's subjective factors and so on. Therefore, more work needs to be done in future.