A Study Of Common Errors In Modal Auxiliary By Senior High School Students And Corresponding Countermeasures

As an important and difficult grammatical point of English in senior high school,the usage of English modal auxiliary has been frequently examined in college entrance examination over the years.However,most of the English modal auxiliaries have more than one meaning and the meanings sometimes overlap,so it is not easy for senior high school students to master them well.Some problems are unavoidable in the process of using modal auxiliary,which brings great difficulties to English teaching.Concerning the study on English learners' use of English modal auxiliary,most scholars attach great importance to the influencing factors and the sequence rather than students' existing problems in the use of English modal auxiliary.Moreover,most of the participants were intended for college students and less involved in senior high school students and there is little study about common errors related to use of English modal auxiliary by senior high school students.Based on the second language acquisition theories such as error analysis,contrastive analysis and transfer theory,this research takes 120 students of Grade two and 3 English teachers in one senior high school in Yantai as the participants to study the types of errors and the causes in English modal verbs acquisition.The main research tools include test papers,questionnaires,and interviews with students and teachers respectively.The research questions are related to the following three aspects:(1)Senior high students' frequency of errors in the use of English modal auxiliary;(2)The major categories of errors that senior high school students have in learning English modal auxiliary;(3)The factors that lead to the misuse of English modal auxiliary and the corresponding countermeasure proposed.According to the results,the research draws the following conclusions:(1)The error frequency of the 10 principal modal auxiliaries used by senior high school student is: should > will/would > must > dare > ought to > may/might > shall> used to > need > can/could.(2)There are four principal types of modal auxiliary errors,such as mismatch of form and semantic meaning,incorrect use of tense,misapplication of negation and collocation errors of fixed pattern.(3)There are three possible influencing factors including interference of mother tongue,complexity of modal auxiliary,and students' lack of effective error management strategies.According to the above findings,some constructive suggestions are proposed for both teachers and students.On the one hand,teachers should help students to make full use of the positive transfer of mother tongue to promote second language acquisition,break the traditional teaching models to clarify the rules of modal auxiliaries and cultivate students' awareness of choosing appropriate modal auxiliary in a specific context.Besides teachers should try to ensure that students pay much attention to the errors they committed,provide students with effective error management instruction and supervision on proper practice and timely review.On the other hand,students should master the complicated semantic meanings and pragmatic rules of English modal auxiliaries and try to use modal auxiliaries in context.And they are supposed to learn to transfer their mother tongue positively into target language acquisition.They should pay much attention to the error correcting,develop good error management habits,share errors with others and form good teamwork spirits.