A Study On The Relationship Between Errors,Dependency Distance And Second Language Proficiency In The Writings Of Chinese English Language Learners

Under the framework of Dependency Grammar,this corpus-based study investigates the characteristics of the development and change of errors in English language writings of Chinese English language learners across eight grades from junior high school to university.This study adopts dependency distance as a metric of syntactic difficulty to explore the relationship between learners’ errors,dependency distance and second language proficiency.The data for this research come from 270time-limited English language compositions collected from one province in China,including two writing genres: narrative and argumentative.All the compositions are inputted into the computer.After automatic annotation,manual tagging and checking,a dependency treebank based on dependency grammar is built.Corpus tagging software Stanford Parser 3.6.2 is used to tag and analyze the corpus,and Microsoft Excel 2007 is employed to measure and calculate dependency distance,a quantitative indicator,in dependency grammar,and the error frequency of learners.After that,the quantitative data obtained is further analyzed by SPSS 20.0.The major findings are: 1)The error rates of Chinese students’ English language compositions gradually decrease with the improvement of English proficiency.The proportions of syntactic errors in English language composition of students at different levels are higher than the proportions of lexical errors,indicating there are still certain problems in syntactic development;2)Dependency distance has a significant impact on error rates in low-and middle-level learners’ writings.They have higher error rates in long-distance dependency relations than in short-distance ones,which may be related to the learners’ cognitive mechanism and low English proficiency;3)Dependency distance and English proficiency have a significant interactive effect on the error rates of Chinese learners,and learner’s English proficiency could modulate the magnitude of long dependency distance effects.As high-level learners improve their proficiency,they could use chunking to improve their ability to process complex syntactic relations in English.Therefore,there is no significant difference between high-level learners’ error rates in long-distance dependency relations and short-distance ones;4)With the improvement of language proficiency,the learners’ lexical error rates usually decrease.Learners are prone to make prepositional collocation errors at long-distance dependency relations;5)As English proficiency improves,the syntactic error rates induced by long-distance dependency relations have shown a significant downward trend.Low-and middle-level learners are prone to make errors such as missing components,wrong tenses of verbs and preposition redundancy in long-distance dependency relations.This study investigates the relationship between dependency distance,English proficiency and the errors of second language learners from a cognitive perspective,so as to reveal the cognitive mechanism of second language learning.The results of this article illustrate that second language learners’ errors have a certain regularity,and in order to facilitate their acquisition of complex syntactic relations,English teaching strategies can be appropriately adjusted to weaken the constraints of cognitive mechanisms on English beginners.It is also hoped to shed some light on future research on error analysis.