The Corpus-based Error Analysis On The Written Formulaic Sequences Of Chinese EFL Learners

As one of the five basic skills of language learning,writing has always been regarded as a measure standard of learners’ language competence.Besides,how to achieve the idiomaticity and accuracy of written languages has also been a key concern in the field of writing study.In recent years,the formulaic sequence,which is stored whole from memory,has gradually become a research emphasis in second language acquisition,because being the linguistic unit it can effectively reduce students’ thinking time during speaking and writing,and thus achieve the fluency,accuracy and idiomaticity.In addition,more and more studies have shown that the correct use of formulaic sequence can improve students’ writing skills.However,the current studies about formulaic sequence mainly focus on its use condition,especially the correlation between the use of formulaic sequence and students’ oral and writing competence while the study on formulaic sequence errors is relatively less.Therefore,in this study,the author aims to explore the condition of different types of formulaic sequence errors in Chinese English learners’compositions and answer the following three questions:(1)What are the distribution features of formulaic sequences in English writings for senior high school students and students of CET-6?(2)Compared with the senior high school students,what are the variation characteristics of formulaic sequence errors for students of CET-6?(3)What are the possible reasons of formulaic sequence errors in Chinese EFL learners’ writings?The study is based on the error analysis and the corpus-based approach,firstly choosing 200 compositions from the sub-corpora ST2(senior high school students)and ST4(students of CET-6)of Chinese Learners English Corpus(CLEC)as the subjects.Then according to Lewis’ classification of formulaic sequence,lengths and parts of speech,the author identifies the formulaic sequences used in students’ writings,and marks the formulaic sequence errors.Later,MYFINDER is used for searching the number of different types of formulaic sequences and different types of formulaic sequence errors of each group.Finally,the frequency of each type of formulaic sequence errors appearing in the corpus is noted down and converted into tables for the analysis with the help of SPSS 17.0.The findings are as follows:(1)Based on the Lewis’ classification,senior high school students use collocations and polywords more frequently;in terms of the lengths of formulaic sequence,they employ two-word and three-word formulaic sequences more frequently;according to the parts of speech,senior high school students prefer using nominal,verbal and prepositional formulaic sequences.As for students of CET-6,although the distribution features in use is similar to senior high school students,they employ more formulaic sequences than senior high school students.In addition,there exists a significant difference of using features between two groups through the test of significant difference.(2)As a whole,the more formulaic sequences students use,the more errors they tend to make in the writings of two groups.Therefore,students of CET-6 make more errors than senior high school students.However,in terms of the error rate,the most frequently committed errors are collocation errors,two-word and threeword formulaic sequence errors,as well as the nominal,verbal and prepositional formulaic sequence errors.Compared with senior high school students,the error rates of students of CET-6 are relatively lower.Moreover,there is a significant difference between two groups in collocation errors,two-word and three-word formulaic sequence errors,as well as the nominal and prepositional formulaic sequence errors.(3)In addition,some possible causes of Chinese EFL learners’ formulaic sequence errors are demonstrated as follows.It includes interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer and students’ problems on formulaic sequence learning.Therefore,the author further puts forward some implications for the teaching,for example,teachers should strengthen the comparison between English and Chinese cultures and languages,cultivating students’ intercultural communication awareness,in order to reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue.In addition,teachers should help students realize the significance of formulaic sequences in English writings and enhance the input by means of various approaches,especially making full use of the corpus.Finally,teachers should treat various types of formulaic sequences differently during the teaching,especially to improve students’ awareness of collocation and pay much attention to the lexical meaning in the specific context.