Misuses Of Be In The Secondary Vocational School Students’ English Compositions

The secondary vocational education has taken on the role of training highly qualified workers and is also an indispensable part in our educational system. The government has exerted great efforts to promote the secondary vocational education in recent years. This rapid development has higher and higher demand for the secondary vocational school students’ English proficiency. Because of the differences between mother tongue and target language, their errors occur quite often in the process of English learning. Moreover, they are not able to realize those errors. The acquisition of verb is known to be an essential component of second language acquisition. However, its complex forms and various functions make the acquisition of BE a headache for the secondary vocational school students. The main purpose of this study is to focus on the misuses of BE in the secondary vocational school students’ English compositions on the basis of the theories of Error Analysis, Language Transfer and Interlanguage.Taking the approach of Error Analysis, the writer uses the self-built corpus of secondary vocational school students’ English compositions to analyze the distributions and reasons of BE errors committed by the students. By data analysis, the writer arrives at the following conclusions:1. BE errors are classified into four categories: agreement errors, tense errors, voice errors and redundancy errors. This classification is based on James’ main categories of errors and the practical situation of BE errors made by the secondary vocational school students. The most striking type of BE error is agreement error while voice error is at the bottom of the list.2. Negative transfer of mother tongue is the main reason of misuses of BE in the secondary vocational school students’ English compositions. The students are unconsciously affected by some mother tongue structures in writing. This kind of influence is inevitable.3. To deal with negative transfer of mother tongue, teachers should adopt various methods in order to help students minimize BE errors, such as consolidating the basic usage of BE, paying attention to comprehensible language input, transforming students’ thinking model and etc.Through the empirical study on the secondary vocational school students’ usage of BE, teachers can know the characteristics of BE served as the interlanguage under the influence of both mother tongue and target language. In view of English learning of the secondary vocational school students, more effective teaching strategies will be adopted in order to improve their writing skills as well as their command of English.