A Corpus-based Study Of Tense Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writings

Tense is a grammar category that is utilized to denote the relationship between movement and time.Because of the distinct differences in the concept of tense and aspect between English and Chinese,tense has always been a difficult point in English learning for Chinese students,and they make various errors in the use of tense.Therefore,through analyzing typical tense errors in Chinese students’writings can provide feedback for English teaching.Although many researchers have studied on tense,most of the studies of tense errors based on CLEC are focused on one particular tense and choose ST3-ST6 sub-corpus which contain writing samples of non-English college students or English majors to research,the studies on ST2 sub-corpus which cover senior high school students’ writing samples are extremely limited.These theories are chosen as the theoretical foundations of this thesis,namely,Contrast Analysis,Error Analysis and Interlanguage,the current study adopts the sub-corpus ST2(writings of senior high school students)of CLEC(Chinese Learner English Corpus)and the self-built corpus which contains 170 sampled compositions collected from midterm and final examination of seniors in Yuelu Senior High school of Yinchuan city.It aims to explore the distribution characteristics of tense errors made by senior high school students,find out the most error-prone tense types and analyze the causes of tense errors.On the one hand,this study adopts corpus-based approach to ensure that the sample size is large and be able to meet research needs;on the other hand,the analysis results of the self-built corpus and Chinese Learner English Corpus can confirm with each other,making the research results more accurate and objective.First of all,tense errors of the two data groups are processed by text-retrieval software,AntConc,manual assignment codes for those selected tense errors based on the different error types,then the tense errors are divided into tense form errors and tense choice errors.Secondly,analyzing the re-code data and interviewing teachers and students,the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to analyze tense errors and its causes.The study yields some results.Firstly,simple past,simple present and present perfect are described as the most error-prone tenses.Secondly,the number of tense choice errors is more than tense form errors,which reflects a better command of tense form but a poorer mastery over the tense selection.Thirdly,in simple past errors,its form errors mainly include verb spelling and tense related errors which caused by overgeneralization and irregular verbs,most of its choice errors are misuse with simple present;in simple present errors,its form errors mainly include misspelling of verbs,misuse of auxiliary verbs and the third person singular form errors,for the choice errors,misuse of simple past in place of simple present is the most;in present prefect errors,the form errors are mainly misspelling,bare verbs in place of past participles and past tense misuse as past participles,its choice errors mainly include misuse with simple past,past perfect and simple present.Fourthly,causes of tense errors can be attributed to interlingual interference and intralingual interference and some pedagogical causes,such as induced factor.