Analysis Of Error Characteristics On Subject-verb Concord Of Senior High School-A Study Based On Corpus

Chinese and English belong to different language families and there is no such grammatic rule as the subject-verb concord in Chinese language.Therefore,English learners in China are prone to ignore the rules of subject-verb concord,and they often make the errors of this kind.Following Corder's error analysis procedure,this thesis quotes error analysis theory,interlanguage theory,and output theory as guidance.This thesis takes 100 students from two parallel classes in the grade two of a senior high school in Xingan county,Jiangxi Province as the subjects and collects the different genres of compositions from their monthly examination papers.A total of 200 compositions are collected,as specimens for the analyses of the subject-verb concord errors that occur to the compositions by senior high school students in China.Due to its huge volume of texts,this thesis applies the lingual corpus to make the research.AntConc3.2.1w soft is employed to analyze high school students' English writings.It not only gains student's subject-verb concord errors,but also efficiently indicates the distribution of subject-verb concord errors frequency.This thesis attempts to explore the following two questions:(1)What are the classifications and frequency of subject-verb concord errors distribution in English writings by Chinese high school students like?(2)Is there a significant difference in the frequency of subject-verb concord errors among the compositions of high,medium,and low score students?The research results show that there is a high rate of subject-verb concord errors in senior high school students' writing,of which the principle of grammatical concord has been most frequently offended.There is a significant difference in subject-verb concord errors in high,medium,and low score students' compositions,which means that students with higher score have lower frequency of subject-verb concord errors.The main reasons for students' errors in the subject-verb concord are believed to be the following: interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer,the erosion of subject-verb structure and psychological factors.In view of the many subject-verb concord errors in high school students,the author puts forward some suggestions for English teaching: 1.Teachers should cultivate students' habit of thinking in English and cross-cultural awareness.2.Give more priorities to language input and subject-verb concord instruction,taking into account difference of English learners of various proficiencies.3.Apply information technology in TEFL,taking advantage of web-based writing review systems,using corpus analysis methods to study students' writing errors.4.Encourage peer correction to improve students' communication skills.