A Corpus-based Error Analysis Of English Non-finite Verbs In Senior Three Students' Writing

The study of writing errors has been an important part of second language research.Researchers have done a lot of research in both theory and practice and provided many useful references for second language learning.However,previous studies mainly focused on some frequent parts of speech,such as verbs,nouns and adjectives,etc.By contrast,the research on non-finite verb errors is relatively little.The main types and causes of non-finite verb errors would be explored in this thesis with the aim of improving students' writing ability and teaching of non-finite verbs.On one side,the author collected 300 compositions that are written by 60 senior three students in Xingtai No.2 Middle School in Hebei province to build a small corpus.On the other hand,data in ST2,a sub-corpus in Chinese Learners English Corpus,were also used in this thesis.Then extracting and classifying non-finite verb errors by using corpus concordance tool,it shown that the most frequent errors were tense errors,followed by formula errors.The voice errors were relatively few.In order to make a comparison between the results in two corpora,the error frequencies in two corpora were transformed into their normalized ones.Besides,the independent sample t-test in SPSS20.0was employed to check out whether there were significant differences among them.The results show that the main types and frequencies of non-finite verb errors in two corpora were consistent basically.What's more,there were no significant differences among the mean of these normalized frequencies.It also indicated that tense was the main difficult point for senior three students,even the whole senior high school students.At last,students who made errors would be interviewed to investigate the reasons of these errors.It turned out that the most important factor was interlingual interference(63.8%),followed by intralingual interference(33.6%).While teachers' inducing only account for 2.6%.Based on findings mentioned above,suggestions were given to improve students' writingability and the teaching of non-finite verb.