A Corpus-based Study On Misuse Of English Articles By Chinese Senior High School Student

The system of articles is very complex from both the linguistic and languagelearning perspectives. It is especially difficult for Chinese English learners to masterthe correct and appropriate use of English articles for there are no articles in Chinese.Numerous studies have been conducted on English article system from differentperspectives by both foreign and Chinese scholars. However, most of the studies arejust some descriptions and generations of the usage and function of English articles.Empirical studies, especially those corpus-based ones, are relatively rare.The present thesis will conduct a corpus-based empirical study with a purpose offinding out the characteristics of misuse of articles committed by Chinese senior highschool students and discuss the factors behind them. The present study is based onChinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC), which is composed of writings fromdifferent English learners. Its sub-category ST2is adopted as the researching subject.We use corpus software AntConc3.2.4w to analyze the errors marked as Np1, Np2,Np6, Np7, Wd4, Wd5, Ad3, Aj3in ST2in ST2.According to the researching result, we found out that the characteristics ofmisuse of English articles committed by Chinese senior high school students are asfollows:1) Misuse of articles distributes widely in ST2of CLEC2) Misuse of articlesin ST2can be generally divided into three categories, namely, absence of articles,redundancy of articles and article confusion3) Absence of articles happens mostfrequently and redundancy of articles and article confusion comes second and thirdrespectively.4) The definite article the is omitted or oversupplied most frequently.Based on the analysis of the data obtained from ST2, some possible factors thatmay affect misuse of articles committed by Chinese high school students are discussed from three perspectives, namely, L1transfer, L2related factors and articlesemantics. Some suggestions for the study and teaching of English articles in Chinaare also made in the present thesis.