A Corpus-based Error Analysis Of English Article In Senior High School Students’ Writings

Writing is one of the four basic language skills in English.In today’s high school English teaching,the writing ability of students is more and more valued by teachers.However,English writing is a difficult task for high school students.There are many problems in student’s compositions,and the quality of the students’ writings are not high generally.English article errors can be one of the biggest problem in high school students’ writings.English articles can be important determiners in English and it has always been a hot topic in language research and second language acquisition research because English articles are used frequently and are one of the most difficult grammars for Chinese learners to learn.The English article system includes the indefinite article a and an,the definite article the,and the zero article.The frequency of the definite article is the highest in English.It seems that the system is simple,but for those whose native language has no article system in their native language(such as Chinese),the acquisition of articles requires a long-term process.The purpose of this study is to find out the main types and causes for the errors in the writings of senior high school students,in order to provide reference for improving students’ ability to use articles and improve English teaching.The subjects of this study are the senior one and two students in Xuzhou No.36 senior high school.By collecting their writing samples,a learner corpus is built.The total number of the corpus is 94,043.Through the analysis of the corpus and the results of interviews with students,this study explores article errors in high school students’ English writings and analyzes the causes of these errors to propose corresponding teaching suggestions.This study will solve the following problems:(1)What are the main types of article errors made by senior high students in English writings?(2)What are the frequencies of each types of article errors?(3)What are the major causes of these article errors?The conclusions of this study are as follows.The author has identified 978 article errors with the help of Antconc 3.5.7.These errors are mainly divided into three categories,namely,article redundancy,article omission and article confusion.Article confusion contains the confusion of the indefinite articles and the confusion between the definite article and the indefinite articles.Among them,the number of article errors is978.Article redundancy errors are the highest among all the errors,which accounts for49.4%.Article omission errors account for 35.4%.Article confusion errors account for15.2%.With the analysis of the corpus and the answers in student interviews,the author summarizes four main causes of article errors in these high school students’ English writings,namely,native language transfer,intralingual interference,training transfer and the factors of teaching and learning.Based on the above conclusions,this study puts forward relevant opinions and suggestions on article teaching.