Clec-based Study Of Verb Errors In Chinese EFL Learners’ Writings

Nowadays, people come to be more and more concerned with the fact that English writing performance of Chinese students is far from being satisfactory. One of the problems in students’writing is that the errors they commit block advanced language expression and thus form a barrier to further their EFL learning. In this dissertation, we conduct error analysis of the learner’s writing competence based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC).According to the data from CLEC, the verb error heads the list among the tagged errors of different parts of speech, which occupies over15.1%of the total errors, near double of the noun error rate (8.4%). To address this issue, the writer has conducted an empirical Error Analysis (EA) by integrating error statistics and the corpus-based approach. Specific data for analysis have been obtained from CLEC and compositions written by the freshmen of non-English majors in Inner Mongolia Finance and Economics College.After a thorough analysis of verb errors in the database of CLEC and free writings, we get the following major findings:1. Through the calculation, we can see about2/3verb errors concentrate on VP1, VP3and VP6, with VP6having the highest share. On the whole, the frequency of verb errors in each sub-corpus declines gradually, with no notable distinction between ST3and ST4of non-English majors and between ST5and ST6of English majors, but the distinctions among high school students, English majors and non-English majors as whole are obvious.2. On the whole, most of the sixteen categories of misuse of tenses are widespread among the five corpora. Although the students of each corpus have different language proficiencies, present tense and past tense are the two most frequently misused tenses in every corpus, while all kinds of future tenses except future tense itself and all kinds of past future tenses except past future tense itself are the least frequently misused tenses in each corpus.3. Generally speaking, the sixteen categories of tense errors distribute more evenly in free writings and the error rates of the same tense are different in CLEC and in free writings, which shows that the time limit can indeed affect the students’ performance on tense errors.4. The causes leading to verb errors are mother tongue influence, target language influence and cognitive factors.The findings provide some implications for English verb teaching in china. Generally speaking, English teachers should be devoted to fostering the learner’s built-in grammatical ability rather than instilling grammatical rules in his mind. As for the vpl, vp3teaching and learning, the teachers and learners themselves must be fully aware of L1and L2differences and learn the verb patterns and agreement rules in comparison with the native language. For the vp6teaching and learning, English teachers should spare no efforts to tell students the differences between English temporal system and Chinese temporal system so that Chinese English learners will feel easier to avoid the negative transfer of Chinese.