A Study Of Noun Phrase Errors In Non-English Majors’ Argumentative Writing

In recent years, studies of phrases in English writing are widely favored by scholars. As one of the major types of phrases, the noun phrase plays a very important role in English writing. It can not only serve as different components of sentences, but also carry a lot of information. However, most of the previous studies of the noun phrase have revealed that scholars were more likely to investigate its structure,syntactic functions or semantic meanings. Only a few of them studied the noun phrase errors in English writing. Therefore, this thesis will study the noun phrase in non-English majors’ argumentative writing from the perspective of the error analysis,and find out the reasons, from which some corresponding suggestions for English writing teaching are being made.This paper intends to explore the following problems:(1) In non-English majors’ argumentative writing, what are the main error types and distributions of the noun phrase?(2) What are the reasons for committing the noun phrase errors?The corpus of this study came from 260 non-English majors’ English argumentative compositions. After transcribing the materials into the computer, the first thing to do was coding and tagging. To avoid subjectivity, the tagging work are done by three persons in total, including the author and the other two postgraduates.Then, the author used the Ant Conc software to search for each type of noun phrase errors and got the frequency of errors. And then, the author used SPSS which is a statistical software to calculate the percentage of each category. Furthermore, in order to find out reasons for making the noun phrase errors appearing in students’ compositions, the author interviewed 20 students and analyzed the interview results from which the suggestions were provided.The statistical results show:(1) in non-English majors’ argumentative compositions, there are more simple noun phrase errors than the complex noun phrase errors. Their percentages are 59.9% and 40.1% respectively. This indicates that they are more likely to make the errors of simple noun phrases than the errors of complex noun phrases in their compositions.(2) As to the errors of simple noun phrases, the Det-N errors are the most notable, which account for more than a half. The pronoun errors are moderately marked, while the single noun errors are the least notable.(3)Among the errors of complex noun phrase, the Pre-N errors are slightly less frequent than those of the N-Post. Therefore, it can be inferred that non-English majors’ have difficulty in acquiring the N-Post structure. Regards with the Pre-N errors, the AJP-N errors are the most frequently appeared, while the ADP-N errors and NP-N errors are moderately presented, and the PAR-N errors which is also a subtype of Pre-N are the least marked. In the case of the N-Post errors, non-English majors’ are more likely to make the N-PP errors. The N-ADV errors and the N-ADJ errors are slightly fewer than the N-PP errors. The N-PAR errors and the N-IP errors are very close, while the N-RCL errors are less common in their compositions.(4) Lastly, there are totally 13 subtypes of noun phrase errors, namely, the SN errors, the PN errors, the Det-N errors,the AJP-N errors, the ADP-N errors, the NP-N errors, the PAR-N errors, the N-PAR errors, the N-RCL errors, the N-IP errors, the N-PP errors, the N-ADJ errors and the N-ADV errors. From the least frequent subtype of noun phrase errors to the most frequent type, the order is N-RCL < PAR-N < N-IP < N-PAR < N-ADJ < NP-N <N-ADV < ADP-N < N-PP < AJP-N < SN < PN < Det-N.In addition, it is also found in this research that the main reasons for committing the noun phrase errors are mainly manifested in three aspects. The first one is the influence of mother tongue. The second one is that the students’ knowledge of grammar is not that enough. The last one concluded from the interview results is that students often adopt avoidance strategies when they write compositions in order to avoid making errors, which also explains why the error rate of complex noun phrasesis lower than the error rate of simple noun phrases to some extent.Finally, according to the statistical results and the interview results, some implications for English writing teaching are given.