An Error Analysis Of English Speaking Chinese Learners' Corpus

Applying the Error analysis approach, this thesis analyzed a data of 24,267 Chinesecharacters composed by Chinese learners who had English as their first language. Thecorpus was collected from the HSK center in Beijing Language University. In order toensure that the data resource was reliable and representative, only the compositions oflearners from England, America, Australia and Canada were selected and copied.After the collection of samples, intensive examinations were carried out upon thedata.Admittedly, error analysis of any languages has an inherent problem: theidentification and classification of errors are not guaranteed to be scientific andreasonable. To tackle with this issue, after consulting the error categories proposed bydistinguished scholars in and out of the country, especially the methodology adoptedby Theresa Jen in her Error Analysis in Chinese Language Acquisition, the errorswere classified into three categories according to a linguistic hierarchy (fromcharacter to vocabulary, from vocabulary to sentence). Each error category wasdivided into subcategories. Errors in character were divided into non-sense characterand malapropism;errors in vocabulary were divided into improvised vocabulary,misuse of vocabulary and misapplication of word function while errors in sentencestructure were divided into improper word order, omission, redundancy and mixedsentence patterns. Finally, 977 errors were spotted and classified. 7 suspected errorsand 12 mistakes were identified as well.In Chapter 1, errors viewed by influential Western linguistic theories such asbehaviorism, mentalism and interlanguage theory are reviewed in a historicalperspective. And relevant researches and studies, especially those on error analysisof Chinese language are discussed and evaluated. After that, the problem inclassification and explanation of errors are listed and assessed.As the main body of the thesis, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are written in the order oferror identification, error classification, error description, error explanation and errorevaluation. All the errors are discussed in the hierarchy of character, vocabulary andsentence structure so as to display a bird's eye view of the errors made by high-levelChinese learners.Chapter 4 summarizes the results of the analysis and provides suggestions for furtherstudies. It is concluded that the existence of homophones, pictophonetic characters,two-character words, functional words and interchangeable word orders are the mainresources of the errors. And it is perceived that a phenomenon of "English Chinese"widely exist in the compositions.