A Study On College Students' Errors Of Adjectives In Writing

Adjective is a class of word that has high frequency of appearance, closely next to verb and noun. It has a broad distribution, especially in written English. But its usage is quite complicated, such as its meaning, set phrase, collocation with other words, function and position in a sentence, and so on so forth. The complexity of these factors makes it difficult to master the use of adjective. Although college students have learned the basic meaning, usage and function of adjective, they still make mistakes in using adjectives, especially in writing.In recent years, with the establishment of several large corpora at home, such as Gui Shichun and Yang Huizhong's "Chinese Learner English Corpus", many researchers set about to research the learners' lexical errors based on these corpora. But research on the use of adjective is seldom been down. Therefore, based on the theories of interlanguage, Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis, with the help of concordance software, the author conducts a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative study of Chinese non-English-major college students' adjective errors.This paper mainly addresses the following four questions: 1) is the number of adjective error correlated with the learners' L2 proficiency levels in most cases? 2) What are the types and characteristics of Chinese non-English-major college students' adjective errors? 3) What are the possible causes of these adjective errors? 4) How the learners' use of adjective differs from that of the native speakers'? What are the Characteristics of their adjective use behaviour?Two corpora are employed in this study: CLEC (learner corpus) and BROWN (native speaker corpus). The compositions in ST3 and ST4 sub-corpora in CLEC are discussed and Brown is used as a comparative corpus. And the concordance software AntConc 3.2.1 is adopted to extract related information of the adjectives from the two corpora and make statistical analysis of this information. The author first revealed the relationship of the distribution of Chinese non-English-major college students' adjective errors and the learners' L2 proficiency levels with the help of the related data extracted by AntConc 3.2.1. Then, the author gave a description of the different types of adjective error. And then the author analyzed possible causes of these errors. At last, by comparing the adjectives misused in ST3 and ST4 with those of the native speaker corpus, the author explored the characteristics of the Chinese non-Eng1ish-major college students' use of adjectives.The major findings are as follows: The number of Chinese non-English-major college students' adjective errors is positively correlated with the development of their learning stages. But learners'capability of using adjective in the right way improves with their scores at last. These adjective errors can be classified into five major categories in relation to causes. They are: interlingual errors, intralingual errors, communicative strategy-based errors and induced errors. The major cause of these errors could be contributed to the negative transfer of the mother tongue. There exists little overlap between the adjectives chosen by the learners and the native speakers.On the basis of the results and discussion in previous chapters, some pedagogical implications are offered: 1) teaching English adjectives in comparison with Chinese; 2) Teaching English adjectives with the help of dictionary; 3) Teaching English with the help of corpora and concordancers.However, this research is only a tentative study on adjective errors. There are inevitably some limitations in the analysis, so more efforts are needed to further the study in the future.