A Corpus-based Study On Verb Errors In College English Writings

Writing is one of the four fundamental skills in foreign language learning. While inEnglish writing, verb has been a main problem for Chinese learners due to its diversity andcomplexity in usage. This study analyzes the verb errors of learners’ writings from ChineseLearners’ English Corpus (CLEC) to find that the verb errors rank the first and take up15.1%of all the tagged errors, which reflects that verb usage is still difficult for Chinese learners andneeds some research on it.This dissertation utilizes error analysis and corpus method to conduct a study on verbusage by Chinese learners and attempts to find out the frequency and the causes of verb errorsto shed light on second language acquisition and English language teaching. All the datainvolved in the dissertation are collected from the five sub-corpora (ST2, ST3, ST4, ST5andST6). All the verb errors are retrieved with the software My Finder and analyzes the ninecategories of verb errors and highlights three most frequently misused errors-vp1(errors intransitivity), vp3(errors in agreement), vp6(errors in tense). By quantitative and qualitativeanalysis, this dissertation attempts to address the following questions:1. Which kind of verb error occurs most frequently in college English writings?2. What is the correlation between these errors and the learners’ English writing levels?3. What are the reasons that cause these errors?The major findings of the study are:1. The most frequently committed verb error is the tense error,2. The frequencies of total verb errors decline as the learners’ writing proficiency levelsimprove.3. The main reason for the verb errors are interference of mother language, intralingualfactors and some pedagogical factors.The results and the discussions will provide us with some implications for English verbteaching in China. Corpus method and error analysis theory will be beneficial to verb usagelearning. They should be widely used in English teaching and learning. The teachers shouldcompare the similarities and differences between English and Chinese to avoid the negativetransfer of Chinese...