An Error Analysis On Verb In The English Writing Of Senior High School Students

Writing as an important mode of output,is one of the criteria to evaluate senior high school students' English proficiency.The English writing is gaining more priority in TEEL studies.In an English sentence,verbs are the essential component because of its complicated inflections.To investigate the errors of verbs in senior high school students' English writing composition,based on the Error Analysis theory,corpus retrieval software Ant Conc3.2.1 was applied as its research tools,and combining with the questionnaires for students and the teachers' interviews,this paper tries to search for the language errors occurred in students' English writings and the deep causes of those errors,from which teaching suggestions to improve students' English writing ability could be obtained.The research subjects are students from senior grade two and grade three of the No.3 Middle School of Zhangzhou.There are 150 English composition samples randomly chosen in each grade and the sample amount is 300 in total.A small-scale corpus has been built up and the composition samples have been analyzed by the corpus retrieval software Ant Conc3.2.1,from which the error rates can be found and a discussion on the causes of those errors is made according to relative theories.The major findings in this thesis are summarized as followed:1.The most frequent verb error is non-finite verbs and finite verbs,and the least frequent verb error is tense and subjunctive mood.2.The main reasons for verb errors are interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer.Moreover,intralingual errors are more than interlingual errors,which indicate that verb errors in senior English writing was most influenced by target language.3.The influential factors of students' error correction are: the students' psychological lexicons,meta-cognitive on error correction and careful corrected by teachers.Finally,some suggestions are put forward as how to improve students' writing ability based on the result of analysis.1.Teachers should pay more attentions on the training of non-finite verbs.2.Stop using multiple-choice questions to training English grammar.3.Stimulate the students' interest in English writing.4.To use “http://www.pigai.org” to correct students' English composition.