Corpus Based Analysis Of Tense Errors In CET4 And CET6 Writings

Verb aspects and tenses are considered as one of the most difficult grammatical points in English teaching and learning and one of the parts which are least understood by Chinese students and other English learners. Many researchers have studied about this topic, but they either paid their attention to one particular tense or focused on the influence of one particular respect about the use of tense or tenses with a small-scale database.The present study focuses on tenses----a difficult teaching and learning point. It describes the characteristics of the tense errors committed by non-English college students in CET4 and CET6 writings through Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis. In the thesis, the two sub-corpora in Chinese Learner English Corpus are used and the societal statistics software SPSS, the word processing software AntConc and office software Excel.The data in the study are from the two sub-corpora ST3 and ST4. In this thesis, the distributions of the tense errors in the two sub-corpora are described respectively by classifying the tense errors into tense form errors and tense choice errors, and then the results of the tense errors in the samples are generally described. The tense errors in ST3 are investigated firstly with the help of SPSS, AntConc and Excel. The report of the tense form errors is listed in a table and then showed in a stacked bar chart. The tense choice errors are reported in a table and a simple bar chart. The tense choice errors are classified into two types, underuse errors and overuse errors. These two kinds of tense choice errors are listed in tables. The tense errors in ST4 are analyzed in the same way with that in ST3. On the basis of those jobs, the tense errors in ST3 and ST4 are contrasted and interpreted, and the errors are classified into sixteen kinds of the tenses with an aim to study the characteristics of the distribution and the possible reasons are explained. At last, the factors of the tense errors made by the students are further investigated.