An Analysis Of Interlanguage Verb Errors

English is acquired consciously in China as a foreign language. In the course oflanguage learning, Chinese is the learners’ native language, and English is the targetlanguage. As for the language of learners, which is also called interlanguage, is alanguage system with change all the time. Because of the distinction between targetlanguage and native language, the errors of interlanguage are unavoidable in the languagedevelopment. The study of the development of interlanguage is one of the most importantareas in SLA. As one of the focuses, verb is worth studying especially for Chineselearners.At first, the author reviews the development and researches of interlanguage, erroranalysis and verbs at home and abroad. Based on this step, the author tries to analyze theverb errors committed by students in Grade12in western Zhejiang. The result may showone aspect of the interlanguage levels of students in Grade12in western Zhejiang, andmay provide implications for English language teaching. Specifically, the present thesis aims at finding answers to the following questions:(1)What types of verb errors are committed by Chinese students in Grade12in thewestern area of Zhejiang province?(2)Which type appears most frequently?(3)What are the reasons for committing verb errors?(4)What are the possible solutions to the problems of verb learning based on theresearch?Finally, the author puts forward some pedagogical suggestions according to theresearch results.First, students should have more language input and output.Second, students’ awareness about verbs and verb errors should be heightened.Third, verb errors should be corrected in a suitable way by teachers.The author adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods. The sources of the dataare from five middle schools in western Zhejiang. The interview as well as thequestionnaire is employed. By these methods, the conclusions of the thesis are asfollows:(1)Types of verb errors committed by students in Grade12in western Zhejiang areas follows: errors of tense, errors of agreement, errors of non-predicate verbs, errors ofintransitive verbs, errors of non-durative verbs, voice errors and other errors.(2)The highest frequency of errors is tense, especially errors of simple past tenseand present perfective tense.(3)Reasons for committing those errors include linguistic transfer, cultural transfer,thought pattern transfer, false analogy, overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions,incomplete application of rules, avoidance, literal translating, teachers’ teaching, tearningmaterial and other reasons.(4)The possible solutions based on the questionnaire are as follows: there had betterbe more language input and output; students’ awareness of verb errors needs to beheightened; teachers should give verb error corrections at the right time.At last, limitations of the thesis and further research suggestions are summarized.The analysis of verb errors committed by students in Grade12in western Zhejiang not only helps teachers and scholars understand the characteristics of verbs, but is alsouseful to the improvement of English teaching method. What’s more, it can provideinspirations for other researches of interlanguage.