A Corpus-based Analysis Of The Prepositional Errors In Junior High School Students' English Writing

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education put forward that one of the general objectives of English curriculum in compulsory education stage is to enable students to form preliminary comprehensive language ability.English curriculum should develop students' basic skills of English listening,speaking,reading,and writing.However,in junior high school English teaching in China,writing is usually the most difficult for students.In recent years,researchers at home and abroad have made corpus-based analysis of students' writing focusing on the errors committed by the students,trying to find out the fundamental causes of such errors and put forward effective strategies for teaching English writing.Since among the errors committed by students in their writing,many errors involve the use of prepositions,the author of this thesis conducted a study on the prepositional errors in junior high school students' English writing and tries to answer the following three questions: 1.What are the prepositional errors committed by junior high school students in their English writing? 2.What is the distribution of prepositional errors in the four categories in junior high school students' English writing? 3.What are the possible causes of these prepositional errors?In this study,300 junior high school students in Jiexiu No.2 Middle School of Shanxi,Province were selected randomly as the research subjects,and corpus-based error analysis,contrastive analysis and interview were adopted.The author built a small corpus with the 300 students' compositions for the analysis,and the data were treated with SPSS 20.0 software.The research results of this study show that the total number of prepositional errors committed by the students in three grades is 756,which are divided into four categories: set phrase errors,absence errors,redundancy errors and pattern errors.The number of errors in the four categories is different,the proportion of set phrase errors is the largest,and the proportion of pattern errors is the smallest.As far as each grade is concerned,the total number of prepositional errors of Grade 7 students is 306,of which the number of set phrase errors is the largest,and the number of absence errors is the smallest.The total number of prepositional errors of Grade 8 students is 252,of which the number of set phrase errors is the largest,and the number of pattern errors is the smallest.The total number of prepositional errors of Grade 9 students is 198,of which the number of set phrase errors is also the largest,and the number of redundancy errors is the smallest.Among the three grades,it can be seen that the number of every category of Grade 7 is the largest,and the largest number of prepositional errors in each grade is set phrase errors.It can be seen from the results that with the increase of learning,students master prepositions better and better.But the change of absence errors is unstable,which shows that absence error is the most difficult to solve.Based on the results of interview,the author finds that the possible causes of prepositional errors in junior high school students' English writing are inter-lingual interference,intra-lingual interference,insufficient attention paid by students and teachers,lacking of correct learning methods and proper teaching methods.The implications are as follows: teachers and students should pay more attention to the teaching and learning of prepositions;teachers should pay more attention to the differences between English and Chinese in teaching prepositions,while students should avoid writing a composition in Chinese first and then translating it into English word by word;teachers should improve teaching methods,such as creating proper follow-up tasks for students to consolidate their learning,training students to use proper English dictionaries,especially English collocation dictionaries in learning prepositions.