A Study Of The Use Of Verb BE In Middle School Students' Writings

Verb BE abounds in research contents and values for its varied forms and complex functions.This characteristic also brings some difficulties and puzzles to English learners,which becomes an unavoidable problem in English teaching.At present,most of the researches on verb BE focus on college students or senior high school students,and the research results mainly focus on the theory aspects.Few researches lay attention on junior high school students,or put forward specific teaching strategies and practice reports.Hence one can see that the research on the use of be verbs for junior high school students has research value and practical significance.Based on Language Transfer and Error Analysis,this thesis conducts an analysis on students' English writings and finds three kinds of errors in the use of verb BE:misuse,lack and redundancy.Under the theories mentioned above,combined with the teaching practice,the reasons for errors are assumed,and verified by questionnaire,interview,and action research.This study also explores effective teaching strategies and methods in action research.The action research lasted for 7 months and was carried out in class 2 and 3 of Qinglian Middle School in Jiangyou City,Sichuan Province,with 103 students in total.The action research is divided into three rounds: the first round focuses on stimulating students' interest and changing students' cognition on learning of verb BE.The teaching of verb BE is also combined with other types of classes,enriching the context of use,which is helpful to stablish the awareness of comparative analysis and error analysis of students.The second round of action focuses on cultivating students' learning autonomy and further improving their comprehensive application ability in the unit topic review class.The third round of action mainly uses a variety of tools,such as mind mapping,writing scale,self-evaluation table to help students develop personalized monitoring strategies.The results show that the complexity of be verbs brings some difficulties to students' learning.Students unconsciously turn to their mother tongue for help,resulting in negative transfer.Teachers follow the traditional teaching mode,pay more attention to explanation which leads to insufficient follow-up practice and errors.The teaching of Verb BE relies on grammar class,which has strong exam color and more mechanical exercises.As beginners,students fail to develop the learning strategy of independent monitoring.The grammar rules are abstract,and the grammar learning is boring,which fails to arouse the enthusiasm of learning.Because of the above reasons,students can't use Verb BE flexibly in writing,which leads to mistakes in using Verb BE.The innovation of this study is as follows:1.In action research,the teaching mode and method of reducing verb BE errors are explored,not limited to the theoretical level.2.Adopting the mode and thinking of topic review can improve students' comprehensive language use ability and change their negative cognition of errors and language learning.3.It provides a reference way for the teaching of verb BE in junior high school.