Corpus-based Redundancy Error Analysis In Junior High School Students’ Writing

As globalization continues to advance,the importance of English cannot be underestimated.English,as one of the school curricula in China,has received a lot of attention from teachers,parents,and students themselves.Listening,speaking,reading,and writing have long been the key indicators of students’ English proficiency,and writing,as one of the important criteria,is an important means of testing students’ English output.However,in students’ writing,there often exists many problems,for example,some students are not highly motivated to write,some schools’ English teaching is exam-oriented,and at the same time,there are various errors in writing.In Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC),a series of writing errors were coded,such as errors in spelling and other forms,verb phrase errors,noun phrase errors,word errors and so on.Redundancy error is one of the most frequent type of errors in word error,it not only result in grammatical errors,but also result in the piling up of unnecessary components in compositions.This paper mainly examines the situation of redundancy errors in junior high school students’ writing.The research questions are as follows:(1)How do redundancy errors distribute in junior high school students’ English writing?(2)How does text genre influence the frequency and distribution of redundancy errors in junior high school students’ writing?(3)What are the possible reasons of redundancy errors in junior high school students’ English writing?In this study,a small corpus was constructed with the writing samples of 100 junior high school students,with 29573 words in total,and redundancy errors in the corpus were marked and annotated manually with the help of BFSU Qualitative Coder software.After the annotation of redundancy errors,the frequency and distribution of redundancy errors will be statistically analyzed.Secondly,a questionnaire survey was conducted with 100 students to find out the current status of students’ English writing,along with 8 student interviews,possible reasons for committing redundancy errors were drawn.The main findings of this study are:(1)Students’ redundancy errors mainly focus on syntactic redundancy errors,followed by textual redundancy errors and semantic redundancy errors.In the category of syntactic redundancy errors,articles redundancy errors are most frequently committed by the learner,followed by verbs redundancy errors and preposition redundancy errors;(2)There is no significant correlation between the genre of writing and the frequency of redundancy errors,i.e.,the genre of writing does not significantly affect students’ redundancy errors;(3)Students’ redundancy errors were caused by interlingual transfer,intra-lingual transfer,affective factors and the use of writing strategies.Interlingual transfer is mainly manifested by their over-reliance on their native language in writing,and they often complete their English writing by means of translating Chinese to English.Intralingual transfer is mainly manifested in their incomplete understanding of English itself,i.e.,overgeneralization,lack of understanding of grammatical points,wrong concept of linguistic knowledge,and neglect of the context of use.In addition,the correlation analysis of the questionnaire shows that students’ affective attitudes towards English and their using of writing strategies influence students’ redundancy errors.Meanwhile,students’ affective factors correlate with students’ employing of writing strategies.Therefore,when they have positive attitudes toward English writing and show intrinsic motivation to learn,their writing performance will be better.Some pedagogical implications can be drawn from this research: firstly,in English teaching,we should pay attention to the contrastive teaching between Chinese and English to help students understand the differences between Chinese and English expressions,which can improve students’ intercultural communication skills on the one hand and reduce interlanguage transfer to a certain extent on the other hand;secondly,we should strengthen students’ language knowledge training to reduce intra-language transfer;finally,we should pay attention to students’ emotional value,stimulate students’ intrinsic motivation and help them form a positive attitude toward writing,and develop their awareness of using writing strategies,so as to improve the quality of teaching and learning of English writing.