An Error Analysis Of The Misuse Of Coordinating Conjunctions In Chinese ESL Learners’ Writings

Being an important tool in conveying thoughts and ideas, writings always play a very important role in the international communication. However, it is not an easy job to learn to write well in English for the Chinese ESL learners. Take coordinating conjunctions, the higher frequently used words in English, for example, they are not as easily well-acquired by Chinese students as they appear to be in the daily use by native speakers. Yet, insufficient attention has been drawn to the study of coordinating conjunctions, which often lead to great difficulties in the acquisition of coordinating conjunctions for Chinese ESL learners.The present thesis has selected and, but and or, the three coordinating conjunctions of higher frequency, as the target words in the research to analyze the misuse of the words in Chinese ESL learners’ writings of English under the theory of Error Analysis. The study also adopts a corpus approach--- making use of the two corpora: Learner Corpus(LC) and Control Corpus(CC). The former consists of 21 MA theses of Chinese English graduates selected from CNKI(China National Knowledge Infrastructure), forming a 365,364 words corpus; while the latter consists of 22 native English speakers’ MA dissertations between the years 2001 and 2012, selected from Proquest-PQDT, forming a 480,649 words corpus. Wordsmith Tools is used in the analysis of the data.The focuses of the study are as follows:(1) the general characteristics and differences of coordinating conjunctions in the writings of Chinese students of English major compared with that of native English speakers in terms of frequency, left and right collocation and clusters(three words), as well as the underlying causes for these differences;(2) the errors and error-types of coordinating conjunctions made by Chinese students in their writings and the underlying causes for the errors;(3) the general characteristics and differences of Sentence-initial And(SIA)/ Sentence-initial But(SIB) in the writing of Chinese students of English major compared with that of native English speakers in terms of frequency and collocation.The study has shown that Chinese graduate students of English major, although taken to be high-level English learners, still have problems in their use of coordinating conjunctions. To be specific, first, in terms of frequency, Chinese ESL learners are overusing and and but in their theses to a minor degree, while underusing or. Second, Chinese learners and native speakers have different preference in using coordinating conjunctions, which means that Chinese learners are not native like in using them. Third, errors in Chinese learners’ theses are identified and analyzed, and types of errors are also summarized. Forth, there exist great differences in using SIA and SIB between Chinese learners and native speakers. Chinese learners overuse SIA to the amount that the frequency of SIA in Learner’s Corpus is 6 time higher than that of native speakers. The frequency of SIB used by Chinese students is around 3 times than that used by native speakers. Fifth, native speakers show an ability of using SIA in various sentence structures, while Chinese students lack such ability.In order to help Chinese learners master the usage of coordinating conjunctions as native speakers do, the author puts forward some suggestions in terms of teaching materials and implications. First, Chinese ESL learners’ awareness of using coordinating conjunctions in a correct and more native-like way should be raised. Second, up-to-date teaching materials should be used in class. Third, different teaching methods and assisting teaching software should be adopted in class.