An Analysis On Verbs In Senior High School Students' Writing On The Basis Of Error Analysis

Verbs play a critical role in English sentences.Whether learners are capable of using verbs correctly or not has a great effect on the quality of their writing.But it has been proved that learners are prone to make errors when they use verbs in writing.According to Chinese Learner English Corpus,the rate of verb errors reaches 15.03% which is nearly twice as the amount of noun errors(8.4%).The proper use of verbs is not easy for learners for it always varies with number,person,gender or case in English which is quite different from Chinese.The error of verbs in sentence can lead to obscure meaning or ungrammatical expressions.As writing is one of vital outputs in language learning and one of the important criteria to evaluate learners' comprehensive language ability.It can not only reflect learners' ability of using the words,phrases,and sentence structure,but also partly present the teaching result.It is a valuable material for the research conducted on the usage of the verbs.The purpose of this thesis is to reveal the common errors of senior high school learners when they use verbs in writing and to analyze the causes of these errors.This study has been conducted on the basis of Error Analysis.It aims to study the use of verbs in writing by building a mini-corpus.In light of the procedures of Error Analysis,the researcher collected 53 free writing papers from Class 5,Senior 2 in Fuzhou No.4 Senior High School at the beginning of the experiment and studied the verb errors.With the help of the corpus software AntConc 3.5.7,211 errors have been counted.Next,the procedure of describing and diagnosing have been conducted to find out the reasons of verb errors.Then,the researcher evaluated errors to distinguish trivial errors and valuable errors.On the basis of the result of error analysis at the beginning of the experiment,error correction has been carried out 12 times for 3 months.At the end of the error correction,learners have been required to complete a free writing again.Then,the writing papers were collected and analyzed by the researcher to compare the result with those that were distributed at the beginning of the experiment.The main findings of this study are as follows.(1)Errors of set phrase,mis-selecting of verbs,errors of modal auxiliary,errors ofnon-finite and errors of transitivity are the common kinds of verb errors.(2)The verb errors are mainly due to target language since the result shows that the intralingual errors occupy 56.5% and the mother-tongue interference accounts for 24.3% errors.(3)The number of verb errors has decreased from 211 to 120 after error correction.At the same time,each type of main verb errors has also decreased.The error of set phrase falls from35 to 20.Mis-selecting of verbs decreases from 30 to 22.Errors of transitivity decrease by5,and errors of modal auxiliary decline from 20 to 13.Then the errors of non-infinite decreases from 13 to 10.The statistics prove that learners' ability of using verbs can be improved significantly with the instruction of Error Analysis..