Substitution Errors In The English Compositions Of Senior High School Students And Teaching Countermeasures

This thesis attempts to explore substitution errors committed by senior high schoolstudents in their writings collected in Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Withcontrastive analysis and error analysis as the theoretical basis, it also seeks to find thereasons why these errors occurred. The aim is to offer Chinese learners some helpconcerning the methods to improve their English writing level and yield somesuggestions on English language teaching and learning.A corpus-based approach is adopted in this study. St2, a sub-corpus of CLEC, ischosen as the data pool of the substitution errors. The software AntConc3.2.2is usedduring the analysis. Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) is the largest learnerlanguage corpus in China so far of one million words, with st2(its sub-corpus) of208,088words. The corpus software AntConc3.2.2is a excellent free one. All thisassures the reliability of this research. Substitution errors are tagged as wd3in CLEC.There are1385substitution errors after the first retrieval. Then some spelling errors aresorted out for further analysis. The software AntConc3.2.2is used again to classify andretag the remaining errors on the basis of two dimensions: the first is parts of speech,and the second is interlingual and intralingual errors.1303substitution errors excluding spelling errors have been found in the study,75.7.%of which are traceable to mother tongue interference, which means mothertongue interference is a major cause of substitution errors. The biggest difficulty lies inselecting proper words, especially those synonyms, and the errors mainly occurred innouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. Intralingual errors, although accounting foronly12.3%of the total, are also worth studying due to their importance in findingcauses of substitution errors.The thesis yields some suggestions on language teaching and learning from thedata-driven perspective. The integration of corpora into language teaching and learningmay help students develop their ability of autonomous study, achieving a sound effect in acquiring native-like language. The thesis also provides some teaching designs about"Data--driven Language Learning".