Error Analysis Of Non-finite Clauses In Chinese Senior High School Students' English Writing And The Teaching Strategies

Finiteness is generally considered as the feature of verbs in English and is the important but difficult grammatical item for Chinese learners to acquire.Non-finites include such inflectional verb forms as infinitive,the present participle,the past participle and gerund.In functional grammar,the non-finite clause is defined as a clause composed by the non-finite verbal group without tense,usually subordinate to the main finite clause.Chinese students often make mistakes in their writing when using the non-finite clauses.The thesis aims to conduct error analysis of non-finite clauses and find out the relevant teaching strategies in terms of language interference from the systemic functional perspective.Before we conduct error analysis,we analyze the non-finite clauses in student's books of New Senior English for China based on the corpus of the reading passages,and the students' writing samples are from 4 regular tests for the senior 3 students monthly in a senior high school in Guangdong Province.We chose 90 participants in two classes as subjects and collected 240 valid compositions for error analysis of non-finite clauses.Besides,a questionnaire is conducted to survey students' attitude to English writing and the use of non-finite clauses.Non-finite clauses in the textbooks and non-finite errors in students' writings are analyzed in terms of transitivity,information structure and the logic-semantic relation.It is found out that students tend to use non-finite clause to express the complex ideas but they often are confused about the experiential difference between different forms of non-finite and ignore the information structure as well as logic-semantic relations between clauses.And these are caused by inter-lingual interference between Chinese and English,intra-lingual overgeneralization of grammatical forms and the translation method of teaching and learning.Consequently,the teacher should drag the students' attention to the meaning and function of language in the context and encourage students to think in English avoiding the negative transfer of Chinese.