A Study Of Linking Adverbial Errors In The Compositions Of Non-English Major College Students

Shu Dingfang said that the errors in words can influence the communication morethan the errors in grammar. Many researchers abroad have studied linking adverbialssince1970s. Biber explored the usage of linking adverbials in English by corpora. Inaddition, Altenberg compared linking adverbials in corpora of Swedish English learners’and native speakers’. He found that Swedish English learners misused and overusedlinking adverbials, but no evidence supported the idea that language transfer influencedthe position of linking adverbials in a passage. In China, Professor He Anping did a studyon so. The overuse and misuse of so can not be due to language transfer. In the presentstudy, the use of lining adverbials in non-English major college students’ compositions isinvestigated based on the previous studies. More attention of the misuse of linkingadverbials and the causes of errors is paid to and meanwhile the assumption of whetherlanguage transfer is the main cause of misusing and overusing linking adverbials needs to be verified.The compositions and questionnaires collected for the study are from272non-English major college students. By analyzing the data, it demonstrates that linkingadverbials are overused in students’ compositions. Moreover, linking adverbials instudents’ compositions are much more than that in native speakers’ through comparingwith native speakers’ corpus, COCA. The misuse of linking adverbials takes up40%. Thedata also shows that nearly three fourths of the students are over-confident about theiracquisition of linking adverbials. By examining Modern Chinese Corpus, mother tongueinfluences the use of linking adverbials in students’ written English to a large extent. Thatis to say, in the study, negative transfer of mother tongue is one of the main causes ofmisusing and overusing linking adverbials. Except that, the questionnaire survey andstudents’ composition analysis reveal that overgeneralization and students’ attitude arealso the causes of errors.In order to help students reduce the errors, teachers should pay more attention tostudents’ misuse and overuse of linking adverbials and apply corpora in teaching.Students should realize the importance of linking adverbials and reading more passageswritten by English native speakers. Additionally, they should be aware of the differencebetween the two languages and avoid the negative transfer of mother tongue. Relevanteducation departments should provide more opportunities of training for teachers toimprove their knowledge and level of computer technology, so as to improve teachinglevel and teaching quality.