The Usage Of Intransitive Verbs By The Students In Senior High School

The importance of vocabulary in EFL learning has been emphasized for years. Wilkins (1972) mentioned that a lot of things could not be expressed without the application of grammar, but nothing could be conveyed if there were no words. It emphasized the importance of words. As we all know, vocabulary is the basis and plays an important role in learning the language. For decades, various aspects of vocabulary have been paid more and more attention to, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. Verbs play an important role in expressing the meanings through the language, from the aspect whether the object could occur after the verbs directly or not, the verbs can be classified into transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. The transitive verbs have been studied by some scholars and the importance has been emphasized, but the study of intransitive verbs has not been noticed so much. In the process of English learning, intransitive verbs are not so easy for the students to master. Many students feel puzzled about the different usage of the intransitive verbs. Usually, they can not avoid making errors. The thesis aims at studying the usage of the intransitive verbs of senior high school students.According to the requirement of the New Curriculum Standards, my study has searched the course book to find the intransitive verbs that the students need to master. In order to get the features of the intransitive verbs, the instruments includes test, questionnaire and interview are needed to collect data. The research questions are as follows:(1) What are the highly frequent intransitive verbs and the patterns in senior high school?(2) What are the errors of intransitive verbs committed by the students in senior high school?(3) What are the reasons that cause the errors of intransitive verbs in senior high school?In order to solve the problems, some instruments are applied in the thesis. The instruments in the thesis are three types, the test, questionnaire and interview. The test is used to study the situations of the intransitive verbs, their patterns and the aspects of errors the students make in using them. So as to know how the intransitive verbs used by the students in senior high school, the questionnaire and the interview are necessary to put into use. Through the study, it is concluded that the patterns of the intransitive verbs are usually presented as:Vi+that clause. Vi+Prepostions; Vi+Adverbs and Vi as a complete component. According to the study, it is found that students always make errors of intransitive verbs in various ways. For example, some of them misuse the proper prepositions after the intransitive verbs; a number of them add prepositions before adverbs and misuse the adjectives as the adverbs; a quantity of students can not use Vi to express the meaning independently and they misuse the intransitive verbs in passive voice. The direct reason to cause these errors is negative transfer of the mother language through EA. There still exist other reasons, for example, the improper teaching methods, the lacking of practice and the personal reasons of the students themselves.According to the study, it comes to the conclusion that the intransitive verbs’ learning is the important point and difficult point for the English learning of the students in senior high school. Both the teachers and the students should pay more attention to the usage of the intransitive verbs. My current study has provided the common usage of the intransitive verbs and analyzed the errors students always committed in using such verbs. According to the study, some suggestions are raised to inspire both the teachers and the students to search better ways to learn intransitive verbs.