A Study Of The Misuse Of Verb Be In Chinese Junior High School Students’ English Writings

It is well known that no one can learn any language without committing errors.In the process of learning a foreign language, errors and mistakes seems to beunavoidable. Error analysis plays an important part in English teaching, and it helpsteachers to improve teaching methods. Teachers should analyze the features and thefactors that caused students’ errors, and then improve the teaching strategies. In theprocess of English learning and teaching at schools, students as well as teachers weretroubled by all kinds of errors. Verb be is one of the basic English verbs andfrequently used in English, but they are often misused by the English learners,especially the beginners. The usage of the verb be is a very important grammaticalitem in English learning process. It takes a long time for students to master the usageof the verb be. This study examines the misuse of the verb be of junior high schoolstudents by using the theoretic perspective of error analysis and negative transfer.The data analyzed consisted of493compositions written by the students ofgrade7, grade8, and grade9students from a junior high school in Jinzhou, LiaoningProvince. The compositions are from their mid-term and final examinations. After thecollection of the data, the errors of the verb be were classified into six categories:omission, redundancy, agreement, tense, abbreviation, and collocation errors.The main results obtained from this study are as follows:First, compared with those being used as auxiliary verbs, there are more errors(69.3%in frequency) when the verb be is used as copular verbs.Second, the most striking misuse of verb be is tense error with a frequency of24%. Collocation error is in the second place, which is21.4%in frequency. The leastfrequently misuse of verb be is abbreviation error with a frequency of9.3%.Third, the most responsible factor of the misuse of the verb be is the negativetransfer of mother tongue. During the process of writing English, the students woulduse Chinese thinking mode unconsciously. Therefore the transfer of mother tongue isinevitable.By analyzing the types of misuse of be-verbs by Chinese Junior high schoolstudents, an overall analysis will be made on the appropriate teaching strategies to help learners improve their writing ability and learning strategy and thus learn Englishwell. And this will also be helpful for junior high school English teaching, andsignificant for teaching researches.