A Research On The Use Of English Causative Structure By Art High School Students

Causative structure,commonly found in many languages,is a linguistic representation of people’s perception of the cause-effect relationship.As a basic structure of English,it is frequently found in the use of English by senior high school students in China.However,in the past twenty years of her career as a teacher of the English language therein,the author has found that their use of causative structure has demonstrated a single fixed pattern,which is often error-prone and hard to correct,and over time leads to fossilization.Existing studies on students’ use of causative structure focus on such topics as "lexicalization","verb phrases" and "light verbs",while some others limit their scope to the college level,especially writing by college students.This thesis,however,sets out to investigate the use of causative structure by high school students,mainly focusing on the following two questions:(1)What are their improper uses of causative structure?(2)What are the causes of such errors? Guided by the theories of error analysis and language transfer,the author administered a diagnostic test to students in a high school of the arts in Hubei,China.Students’ answers were then categorized and compared with the results of interviews with the same group of students in order to analyze the causes of erroneous use of causative structure.Based on such analyses,improvement strategies are proposed for both language learning and language teaching.The current research has identified three types of errors in the use of causative structure:(1)errors of semantic understanding;(2)errors of structure;(3)errors caused by cultural differences.Through above-mentioned analyses,causes of errors have been attributed to five factors:(1)differences in language systems;(2)differences in affixes;(3)differences in cultural backgrounds,specifically differences between subject awareness and object awareness,as well as between individualism and collectivism,and differences in the concepts of family and hierarchy;(4)the influence of language transfer,which included positive transfer(such as syntactic causative and parts of morphological causative verbs)and negative transfer(such as lexical causative verbs,morphological causative verbs and morpheme conversion causative verbs);(5)other factors,such as students’ lack of learning motivation and teachers’ inclination towards certain structures.The thesis,based on these findings and analyses,concludes by proposing improvement strategies for both teaching and learning.The present research is aimed at helping high school students of the arts understand the real meaning of causative structure and use them properly,and helping teachers detect students’ misuse of causative structure in time,reducing inclination,and administering purposeful practice so as to cultivate students’ awareness and ability to use causative structure correctly and authentically.