| Modal verbs of necessity are a group of modal verbs expressing necessity.It appears that they have simple forms,but complex semantic and pragmatic meanings.However,a lot of studies show that Chinese learners often make errors in forms or semantics in English compositions(Qiu & Cheng,2009;Ling,2016;Yang,2018;Khojasteh,2013).Although there are fruitful researches on the semantic meanings of these modal verbs(Yang,1993;Liu,2011;Wang & Pan,to appear)and the comparisons between English and Chinese(Yang & Ye,2016;Liu,2014;).The empirical studies are few.Therefore,based on Palmer's(2013)modality theory and Corder's(1974)EA(Error Analysis),this thesis collects and analyzes data from the three sub-corpora,ST2(high school learners),ST3(freshmen and sophomores)and ST4(juniors and seniors)in CLEC(Chinese Learners English Corpus).The research questions are as follow:(1)What kinds of errors do Chinese learners make in English compositions?(2)What are the commonness and characteristics of the errors of modal verbs of necessity in different learning phases?(3)What are the potential reasons?Due to these questions,we run the corpus index tools AntConc3.5.7.0 and find that the errors can be classified into different error types.In addition,the commonness and characteristics of the errors of modal verbs of necessity at different learning phases are discussed.To seek the deep reasons,we also make questionnaires and hand out them to high school learners and non-English major learners to do the survey.We further analyze the results of the questionnaires,and also discuss the current teaching methodology with some high school teachers.The potential reasons are provided based on James' diagnosis-based categories of errors.And,teacher's methods and learner's abilities may also be relevant.Finally,some useful pedagogical suggestions are given for reference.According to our findings,there are 357 errors in total,and the number of form errors is obviously higher than semantic errors.Moreover,the former includes the spelling errors,tense errors,mood errors,voice errors and the wrong forms of the verbs behind modal verbs of necessity.The latter refers to the mis-collocation between modal verbs of necessity and auxiliary verbs like ‘do' and ‘have',the mis-collocation among modal verbs of necessity(‘will' and ‘can')and the lack of sentence predicates due to choose wrong modal verbs of necessity.The types of errors among these three sub-corpora are almost the same,though their distributions in these corpora are different.In sub-corpus ST2,tense errors and mood errors are more than other errors;in ST3,the number of spelling errors and tense errors is higher than that of the other two error types;in ST4,tense errors and voice errors have a high ratio compare to spelling errors and mood errors.The potential reasons for these errors may come from the following two aspects: firstly,learners make errors due to interlingual factor and intralingual factor,i.e.,overgeneralization and the negative transfer of ML(mother language)during the second language learning;secondly,teachers did not pay much attention to modal verbs of necessity in their daily teaching.They only explain modal verbs of necessity when they appear in exercise.And student's ability also plays a role,especially their motivation and strategy in learning modal verbs of necessity. |
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