Error Analysis On Verbs In English Compositions Of Junior Middle School Students

Among the four basic skills in English learning,listening,speaking,reading and writing,writing can best reflect students' comprehensive language ability.Therefore,the English writing has become the key and difficult point in the teaching of English in junior middle school.However,from the current situation of junior middle school students' English compositions,there are still many problems in language expression.The most serious problem is verb errors.Accordingly,this paper mainly analyzes the verb errors in English compositions of junior middle school students.In this study,according to the five steps of error analysis put forward by Corder(1974),the author takes the methods of text analysis,questionnaire and interview to investigate the current situation of verb errors in English compositions of junior middle school students on the basis of the theory of error analysis and language transfer.In addition,the author will analyze the causes of verb errors and put forward practical teaching suggestions.This study aims to solve the following two questions:(1)What kinds of verb errors are committed most frequently in junior middleSchool students' compositions?(2)What are the reasons for verb errors?The main subjects of the study are 83 students from two classes in Grade 9 of XuZhou No.36 junior middle school.The author collects and analyzes 265 sample compositions of students' three times exams,and the conclusions are presented asfollows.(1)There are seven main types of verb errors occurring in junior middle school students' English compositions,namely,errors of the third person singular,verb mismatch,errors of verb “be”,errors of tense,errors of verb spelling,errors of modal verbs and Chinese English.Moreover,errors of the third person singular,verb mismatch and errors of verb “be” are top three among all kinds of verb errors,the percentage is39.66%,25.51% and 14.04% separately.(2)Through the results of text analysis as well as the questionnaire and interview,there are three main causes of verb errors.The first is interlingual transfer,which is equal to the interference of the mother tongue.And negative transfer is the primary cause of that.The second is intralingual transfer,which includes over-generalization,ignorance of rule restrictions,incomplete application of rules and false concepts hypothesized.The third is environmental factors.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward relevant teaching strategies to help teachers cope with the problems in teaching.Finally,it summarizes the research findings and limitations of this paper.