A Corpus-based Study On Redundancy Errors In English Writings By Chinese EFL Learners

This thesis explores redundancy errors committed by Chinese English Foreign Language students in writing. It is well known that a vigorous writing should be concise. Any unnecessary words and expressions should not be included in it. However, redundancy is a pervasive language phenomenon existing in all languages. It widely exists in language structural, semantic and pragmatic level etc. Redundancy is put forward firstly as a concept in information theory by Shannon, which refers to the excess information used to guarantee better understanding in communication. Since its emergence, it has aroused the extensive research of scholars. But the former scholars focus on the function or the usage of redundancy in communication or translation, whereas few have studied its defects. This is just what the present study focuses on. In CLEC, redundancy is treated as a kind of error. We can find a large amount of examples on redundancy errors made by Chinese English Foreign Language students in this corpus. They are classified into three main groups:structural, semantic, and pragmatic redundancy. From the perspective of language transfer, we use contrastive analysis and error analysis to analyze the possible causes of redundancy errors. The analysis suggests that these errors are mainly caused by interlingual and intralingual factors. In addition, the research methodology is corpus-based, and qualitative and quantitative in analysis. That is to say, data are collected by computer and analyzed manually, which is superior to the previous researches conducted by experimental method. This automatic method can somehow avoid some limitations of traditional methods.Errors are unsuccessful bits of language (James1998:228). Without errors, English will always remain foreign. The study of errors has long been researched in the field of the Second Language Acquisition with a view to exploring the causes for making errors in the course of a second/foreign language. Redundancy errors are obvious in the writing of English Foreign language learners, and most of them are viewed as Chinglish, which sometimes hinders successful communication. Therefore, the study on redundancy errors provides us significant pedagogical implications. We can find what kinds of redundancy errors are made by Chinese English learners in their writings and get reminded of what should be paid more attention to. Correspondingly, teacher could rethink their teaching process, and adjust teaching materials and techniques.