A Corpus-based Study On The Construction Of Causal Adverbial Clauses In Senior High School Students’ English Writings

English writing,a significant channel of output,can measure an English learner’s comprehensive competence in language application.Moreover,it is the best way to present a learner’s mind in English.A variety of adverbial syntactic structures are used by senior high school students in writings,among which causal adverbial clauses present possibly the most distinctive and interesting features.The author randomly chose some exam papers by senior high school students during the internship,paid close attention to English writings,and found widespread problems with the construction of causal adverbial clauses.Therefore,the author decided to study and do research on the problem of causal adverbial clauses constructed by high school students based on corpus and exam papers.Based on the concepts of causal adverbial clause,its relevant theories and the procedure of error analysis,the thesis will discuss the following three research questions.First,what are the types and characteristics of causal adverbial clauses constructed by senior high school students? Second,what are the factors that influence high school students to construct causal adverbial clauses? Third,what are the possible ways to help reduce errors when students construct causal adverbial clauses? The author uses CLEC（the Chinese Learners English Corpus 2003）by Yang Huizhong as research data,compared with a self-built small corpus of 180 exam papers used in two monthly exams in 2 classes（a top class and a regular class）in the school where I had the internship to analyze constructive error types and causes of causal adverbial clause.The research results show that idiosyncratic errors and characteristics exist in causal adverbial clauses constructed by senior high school students.The commonest constructive characteristic is the overuse of“because”.Numerous students in high schools have an inclination to use the conjunction“because”to express causes while other conjunctions,like since,in that,as and so on,are less likely to appear in a causal adverbial clause.The second common construction is the postposition of causal adverbial clauses.High school students are used to putting the sentence led by“because”at the end of the sentence,the main clause in front of the subordinate clause.What’s more,the misuse of“because”and“because of”is extremely apparent among students who figure that both expressions can follow nouns,noun phrases,pronouns,even a sentence.In Chinese syntactic structure,“因为”can be followed by a noun or a sentence whereas a sentence is permitted in“because”and a noun of a noun phrase in“because of”.These characteristics and errors are mostly influenced by the negative transfer of the first language,the limited English competence of English learners and grammar teaching methods used by English teachers.In the end,some measures are provided by the author to help minimize the errors based on the internship experience and related references.English teachers,on the one hand,are encouraged to apply theories of pedagogy,advocating the inductive method rather than the deductive method.Meanwhile,meaningful practice should be given to students.Students,on the other hand,should not only review and consolidate grammar knowledge,but also read more English materials to strengthen grammar competence.