A Corpus-based Study On Article Errors By Junior High School Learners In English Writing

Writing,as one of the four fundamental language skills of English has been attached to much importance in today's junior high school English teaching.However,writing is a rather difficult task for learners and the quality of students' writing needs improving.According to the writer's research in the Number 33 junior high school in Shen Yang,the rate of the correctness of articles in students' writings is very low.Although articles only include three categories,the usage of article is complicated.Since the system of articles is absent in Chinese language,it is particular difficult for learners to understand and use articles in their writings.An empirical study is carried on in order to make clear the article errors committed by junior high students in their writings and hopes that the data-driven study will contribute to teaching of writing and articles in junior high school.The two research questions in this research are as follows:1.What kind of errors do the Chinese junior high school students usually make when using articles? 2.What are the causes of article errors in students' writings in junior high school ?The writer collects 241 English compositions written by students in the thirty-third junior high school in Shenyang totally.The writer creates a small corpus named Jh-Writing by herself and then she analyzes these data based on error analysis theory.With the help of searching software Antconc3.2.1 and dictionaries,the writer finds out 1426 noun(noun phrases)in the corpus.Through the analysis of these nouns or noun phrases,there are 718 article errors are found by the writer in total.The writer classifies these errors into three types,that is,omission of articles,oversuppliance ofarticles,and article confusion.Among them,the omission of article in students' writings is made most frequently,accounting for 41.4%.After this study,the writer discusses four causes for these article errors,that is interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer,learners' factors and teachers' factors.Finally,the writer gives some suggestions about article and English writing teaching in junior high school.