A Corpus-based Study On The Current Situation Of Tense Learning In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

English is different from Chinese,and the language change is tortuous mainly through changing of the predicate verb form itself.The tense is not only an important part of the English grammar system,but also a basic concept that is inevitably involved in English teaching.However,due to the huge difference between English and Chinese in terms of tense expressions,students’ mastery of English tense is highly susceptible to the influence of Chinese.Therefore,tenses have always been misused by students,which is one of the most error-prone grammar items in English.English tense learning in high school is also a difficult point for students,especially in English writing;tense errors are one of the most common phenomena in high school students’ English writing and are also an important factor that affect students’ English composition performance.In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have used corpus to analyze students’ writing errors,trying to find the causes of writing errors and the corresponding strategies which have some certain achievements.However,in recent years,the research subjects in China have mainly focused on the study of English majors and non-English majors,and there have been few studies on the learning of English tenses by high school students.Most of the studies are mainly focused on the study of English tense errors.Therefore,the innovation of this research is that on the basis of the original research and the theory of error analysis and interlanguage theory,by taking the writing corpus of high school students(ST2)in the Chinese Learner’s English Corpus and the writing corpus of current high school students(SSC)as the research object,it analyzes the students’ current situation of tense learning in English writing with the aims to solve the following problems:(1)What is the current situation of high school students’ tense learning in English writing?What are the main types of errors?(2)What are the possible causes of these errors?This study uses the corpus research method to ensure that the sample size is large to meet the research needs;on the other hand,the analysis results of the self-built corpus can be mutually verified with the analysis results of Chinese learners’ English corpus,making the research results more accurate and objective.First of all,this paper uses the corpus analysis software Antconc 3.2.1 to retrieve the four types of tense errors,and then calculate the frequencies of tense errors respectively under these four types of tense errors.Next,the retrieval results are combined with the literature to analyze the data,and the three types of tense errors with the highest error frequency are analyzed.Finally,through the use of qualitative research methods,interviews are designed to analyze the causes of these errors,and to put forward teaching suggestions for writing errors.The results of the study show that: first,through the statistics on the frequency of tense errors,the writing of senior high school students are more likely to use the simple present tense and the past tense in writing,especially the latter,then followed by present tense,while other tenses appear in a lower frequency.Second,the errors in the tense choice outnumber the form in both of the corpora after comparison.Third,By analyzing the examples of tense errors and interview results,the possible reasons can be attributed to as interlingual factors,intralingual factors,and other causes,such as oteachers’ teaching and students’ learning.Finally,combined with my own practice experience and literature review,three suggestions are put forward.First,teachers should pay attention to the differences between English and Chinese,and reduce the negative transfer effect of the mother tongue on students’ writing;second,teachers are supposed to make full use of different context in teaching tenses;finally,teachers should enrich the correction methods of English writing.