A CLEC-based Analysis Of Tense Errors In College Non-English Major Students’ Writings

In English teaching and learning, tense is considered to be one of the most essential and difficult points in English grammatical system. However, when it comes to selecting an appropriate tense, students only realize the lexical meaning or the point of event without considering the features of English tenses, which are dynamic and multidimensional. Thus, learners may inappropriately bridge Chinese and English in expressing temporality. It makes the acquisition of English tense into a slow and arduous task for foreign language learners.With the theoretical support of Granger Sylvaine’s Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and Stephen Pit Corder’s Error Analysis, the present research is undertaken to describe, classify, and analyze the tense errors made in the sub-corpus ST3(writings of non-English major college freshmen and sophomores) of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), and170sampled compositions from Grade2010and Grade2011non-English major students of Ningxia University, aiming to get a view of the tense application conditions of students of Ningxia University under the reference of that of national students, analyzing the possible causes for tense errors, and expecting the findings yielded from the present research will throw light on the future English teaching and learning in Ningxia. Although many researchers have explored on tense, most of the studies based on CLEC are carried out focusing on the analysis of different verb errors made by English learners but mentioned tense errors in passing and are usually discussed shallowly; they either focused on one particular tense or paid attention on tenses in general without comparing the similarities and differences between national students and students in specific district. Therefore, the present paper tends to fill in those gaps.The procedure of the present study followed Corder’s EA steps:collecting a corpus of language, identifying errors, describing errors, explaining the causes of errors, and evaluating errors. Thus, linguistic data are firstly collected. Secondly, tense errors are processed by text-retrieval software, AntConc, and the manual work, to tag, identify, and classify those tense errors from nearly1500compositions. They are categorized into sixteen English tenses based on Bo Bing’s sixteen-tense system and further divided into tense form and tense choice errors. Thirdly, the distribution characteristics of tense errors obtained from Grade2010, Grade2011non-English majors in Ningxia University and ST3are both longitudinally and cross-sectionally described, so that to get a full comprehension of the tense errors in Ningxia University. Finally, possible causes and the effects of the errors are discussed.Following findings can be drawn:1) the characteristics of distribution across national students and that in the local university indicate a similar tendency. It reflects a better command of tense structure but a poorer mastery over the tense selection;2) the situation of tense command of students in Ningxia University is not closely corresponding to the extended time of English learning and the development of the English proficiency;3) simple present, simple past, and present perfect are defined as the most problematic tenses across given data groups, it is partially due to the higher frequency of use. In simple present errors, students in Ningxia University commit more form errors, while national students commit more choice errors. Misspelling of verbs and misuse of auxiliary verbs are the two types of form errors. For the choice errors, misuse of simple past in place of simple present is the most common. In the use of simple past, students of both commit more choice errors, in which T1-T5(simple present is used where simple past is required) takes up most choice errors. The form errors can be sorted into verb spelling and tense related errors. For present prefect errors, local students commit more choice errors, while national students commit more form errors. Misspelling, bare verb, and misuse of past tense form are identified to be the top three types;4) the reasons for the disparities of tense errors between local students and national students can be attributed to the inadequate concern with English tense teaching, and laches of English tense learning. And possible causes for the common tense errors are language internal factors (the interlingual transfer and the intralingual transfer) and the external factors (communicative strategy-based factor, induced factor, the writings’ genre, and the attentional bias).