A Corpus-based Longitudinal Study On Run-on Sentence In English Majors’ Writing

English writing has always been regarded as a difficult task for Chinese EFL learners andteachers as well. Error Analysis, as an important approach to analyzing second languagelearners’ language, provides valuable evidence about the linguistic proficiency and learningstrategies of second language learners. Based on EA theory, the thesis attempts to conduct alongitudinal study on run-on sentence errors through quantitative and qualitative approaches,one of the syntactic errors commonly committed by Chinese EFL learners by adopting alongitudinal learner corpus which are composed of compositions written by English majors.The study analyzes the proportions and changing patterns of run-on sentence errorscommitted by79English majors in six terms from Grade One to Grade Three. It is found thatrun-on sentences contain different number of clauses ranging from two to six, among whichthe run-on sentences with two and three clauses account for a great majority of all the run-onsentences. According to the identification of sentence variety, the run-on sentences withcompound sentences occupy a large proportion and significant changing patterns can betraced in six terms. In addition, the study also finds that the misuse of parallel structures canresult in run-on sentences, and the topics of the writing tasks have influence on the number ofrun-on sentences with parallel structures in six terms. Based on the findings, the thesisattempts to explain the occurrence of run-on sentence errors in Chinese context from fourperspectives related to L1transfer, diversity in cultural thinking patterns, education forEnglish majors in China and psychological factors. In addition, the suggestions drawn fromthe research findings are expected to throw light on the improvement of Chinese EFLlearners’ capability of sentence construction and the teaching of English writing in China.