英语专业本科毕业论文样例.doc

A Study of Word Misuses in English Compositions of Chinese Senior High I StudentsA ThesisSubmitted toCollege of Foreign LanguagesQufu Normal UniversityIn Partial Fulfillment of the RequirementsFor the Degree of Bachelor of ArtsBy XXUnder the Supervision of XXMay 2007ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI am deeply indebted to XX, my supervisor, who has read my drafts meticulously and offered incisive comments on them. Without his help, the thesis could never have reached its present form.I am also extremely grateful to XX, my supervisor, who not only helped me collect the corpus, but also gave me a lot of useful materials and advice when I did my teacher practice in Huantai No.1 Senior Middle School. I owe particular thanks to those students who kindly and seriously wrote the compositions, which were used as the corpus in this study. Without their writings, this research wouldnt have been able to be conducted.My sincere gratitude also goes to all my teachers who have given me excellent lectures and great help, which is indispensable to the completion of this thesis. I also give my hearty thanks to all my roommates who offered me generous help and useful suggestions in the process of writing this thesis.Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to all the writers whose works are referred to in this thesis.摘 要错误分析是研究第二语言习得的一种重要方法。本研究通过运用错误分析理论对具体语料进行考察，试图回答两个问题：（1）中国高一学生在英语写作中词汇误用的类型主要有哪些？（2）导致这些词汇误用的主要因素是什么？本次研究涉及的语料是从高一学生78篇限时英语习作中选出的35篇文章。研究结果表明，高一英语习作中词汇误用可分为三类：词形失误、词义失误和句法层面上的词汇失误,其中句法层次上的词汇失误是这三个失误中比例最大的。研究还发现语际间负迁移是导致这些失误的最主要原因。本文还结合以上发现探讨了高中英语习作词汇教学与学习的若干问题。关键词：错误分析；词汇误用；英语写作；负迁移ABSTRACTError analysis is an important approach in second language research. This paper, by applying the procedures of error analysis, attempts to address misuses of words in the English writings by Senior High I students. Specifically, it is to answer the following two questions: (1) How many types of word misuses are there in the English writings of Senior High I students? (2) What are the main factors that cause word misuses? The corpus used for the study is 35 timed English compositions written by Senior High I students. The results show that the word misuses mainly appear at three levels: morphology, semantics and syntax, with syntactic errors taking the largest proportion. The study also finds that the negative interlingual transfer is the most important factor for word misuses. Based on these findings, this paper further proposes some suggestions on how to teach and learn English vocabulary.Key words: error analysis, word misuses, English writing, negative transferCONTENTS0. Introduction.11. Literature review.12. Methodology.22.1 Research questions.22.2 Subjects.32.3 Data collection.32.4 Data analysis.33. Results and discussion.43.1 Results.43.2 Discussion6 3.2.1 Morphological Errors.6 3.2.2 Semantic Errors.7 3.2.3 Syntactic Errors.94. Diagnosing errors.125. Conclusion.155.1 Major findings.135.2 Implications145.3 Suggestions.15Works Cited.16160. IntroductionAccording to Longman dictionary, Error analysis (EA) is defined as “the study and analysis of the errors made by second language learners” (Richards 159). EA, as an alternative to contrastive analysis, was developed as a branch of applied linguistics in the 1960s, arguing that many learner errors were due to universal learning strategies rather than learners mother tongue. Linguists and educators have used it as a useful means to analyze problems found in L2 learning, which in turn have offered solutions to avoid the errors that are expected to occur. In a word, EA is to “identify strategies which learners use in language learning”, “try to identify the causes of learner errors” and “obtain information on common difficulties in language learning, as an aid to teaching or in the preparation of teaching materials” (Longman 159). The major concerns of EA mainly fall into two categories (Carl 25-26). The first category is relevant to Language acquisition by native speakers. The second involves those that concern people who speak English as a second language (either as a second or as a foreign language). This study mainly investigates errors in second category.1. Literature reviewWriting is an indispensable part of Senior High English learning. And it is playing a considerable role in college entrance examination. However, the present situation of English writing is far from satisfactory. Students have the problem with using proper words in the context. Studies show that, for some learner groups, lexical errors are the most frequent category of errors. Grauberg (1971) analyzes the errors of a group of advanced learners of German with MT English and commented on “the preponderance of lexical errors”: 102 out of 193 (53 percent) recorded errors were lexical. Meara (1984) suggests that lexical errors outnumber other types by three or four to one.A great number of studies have also been carried out by teachers and researchers in China who are paying increasing attention to this field. Some discussed the serious problems existing in students writing and current writing teaching (Pan 1992; Zhang Zaixin et al. 1995). Some introduces new attempts or teaching models in improving learners writing ability (Wang, Niu & Zheng 2000; Fu 2002). Some focuses on the function of teachers feedback or error correction in enhancing students writing proficiency (Yang Jinqing 1996; Zuo 2002). Still some other scholars try to illustrate the significance of textual teaching from the aspect of discourse analysis or textual cohesion (Song&Xia2002; Chen 2002). Some other teachers and scholars examine the effects of various factors on Chinese English learners writing ability. However, while previous studies have yielded fruitful results, very few of them explored the specific categories of word misuses in English writings, especially the writings by Senior High school students.2. MethodologyThis part presents the detailed description of the way the present study is conducted. The major components of this part are Research questions, Subjects, Data collection and Data analysis.2.1 Research questionsOn the basis of previous researches, this paper intends to investigate the word misuses in Chinese Senior High students English compositions. Specifically, it seeks to answer the following questions:(1) How many types of word misuses are there in Senior High I students English compositions?(2) What are the factors that cause these problems?(3) What are the implications to the vocabulary teaching and learning in English writing?2.2 SubjectsThe subjects involved in the investigation were 78 Chinese Senior High I students. They were at the fifth year of English learning. The average age of these students were 17.They had all passed the Senior High entrance examination and were studying in the same school. And their marks of the English exam were all above 90. 2.3 Data collectionThe researcher first asked these 78 students to write a 300-word English composition named “A Letter to_ on Thanksgiving Day”. In order to make the results more reliable, they were required to finish this writing in an hour in the same classroom. These compositions were all finished without reference to any dictionaries. After writings were collected, the researcher randomly selected 35 writings from these 78 finished compositions.2.4 Data analysisThe present study aims at analyzing the typical word misuses that appear in Senior High I students English writing. The proportions of each type of word misuses would also be found after the data analysis. Three steps were needed during the data analysis: error detection, error location and statistics of errors.Error identification and error detection As for the classification of word misuses, Liu Chun Yangs (Liu Chun Yang 301) suggestion was taken as a reference in this study. In his paper, different word misuses in Chinese learners English compositions are analyzed on the basis of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Misuses of words are mainly found in three fields, i.e., morphology, semantics and syntax. Subcategories in the three types word misuses were further identified in the data analysis.Error location In this study, the researcher used different numbers to mark the errors and classified them all by hand. There are mainly nine kinds of lexical errors. They are distortion, malformation, redundancy or repletion, ambiguous word, synonym misuse, misuse of part of speech, inconsistency of tense, incorrect collocation, omission and over-inclusion. and errors belong to morphological error (I), to errors are semantic errors (II), and to errors are syntactic errors (III). During error retrieval, different numbers were located at the places where the errors were made. For example,They treat me as their daught (1) to take care of. In this sentence, “daught” is a distortion error, so (1) is marked here.Statistics of errors After the retrieval of all the errors in the corpus, the total number and proportion of each kind of errors were summed up. The results can be seen in Table 1 and Table 2 in 3.1.3. Results and discussionThe findings to the research questions are reported in section 3.1 and in section 3.2 the possible factors that give rise to the results are explored and tentative explanations are discussed.3.1 ResultsAfter the data collection, the researcher found 364 errors. As is shown in table 1, the three types of word misuses are: morphological error, semantic error and syntactic error. Statistics shows that among the three types of errors studied, syntactic errors rank the highest (218 errors, 59.9%), and semantic errors the next (98 errors, 26.9%), which indicate that learners are weak in vocabulary and rules of English. Morphological errors or formal errors rank the lowest (48 errors, 13.2%), which shows that compared with other English skills, spelling is no longer a big problem to the students after 4 years English learning.Table 2 shows the seven subcategories of omission in syntactic errors. Their frequencies, proportions in omission and proportions in the total number of word misuses can be clearly seen in this table.From the two tables, it can be seen that synonym misuse takes the largest proportion. It suggests that students cannot tell apart the words or phrases which have the same or similar meanings. They are not good at using correct words in a certain context. The collocation error, which has the second largest proportion, points to the fact that students are weak in the accumulation of knowledge in English learning process. The researcher finds that the phrases students made mistakes of are all those that they have already learned.Table1. Frequency and percentage of the three types of word misusesType of errorFrequency %Morphology Distortion384810.413.2Malformation102.7SemanticRedundancy orRepetition21985.826.9Ambiguous word226.0Synonym misuse5515.1SyntacticMisuse of part of speech242186.659.9Inconsistency of tense369.9Incorrect Collocation5114.0Omission &Over-inclusion10729.4Table2. Frequency and percentage of each type of omission in syntactic errorTypeNounAdverbPronounArticleRelative pronoun& Relative adverbLinking verbSingleand pluralFrequency451313212328%In omission3.74.712.112.119.621.526.2In the total number of errors1.11.43.63.65.86.37.73.2 DiscussionTo interpret the above results obtained from the study, the findings derived from the data collection and error analysis will be resorted to as a complement. In this part, the researcher will discuss the specific type of word misuses in High Senior I students English writing. Examples of different word misuses in this study will be used in the discussion.3.2.1 Morphological errorsThere are totally 48 spelling or morphological errors. Although this kind of error has the lowest proportion (13.2%), spelling is still a weak point for the Chinese students whose native language belongs to hieroglyphs. Both distortion and malformation belong to this kind of error.(1) DistortionOmission of the letters, overinclusion, misorder and letter misselection all belong to distortion. For example,(1) Grandma also became more debility and had many diseas. (“diseas” is the misuse of “diseases”)(2) I remembered clearly that the farthese place I went to was Guilin. (“farthese” is the misspelling of “farthest”)(3) It is you who always encouraged me when I was disoppointed. (“disappointed” is the misuse of “disappointed”)(2) MalformationMalformation is caused by the overgeneralization of the grammar rules of English. Words formed by malformation do not actually exist in English. They are “created” by English learners who are not familiar with the specific rules of English. Affixation, compounding and other kinds of word-formation are always misused by students to derive the words they need. For example,(1) I dont know how to show my love and thankness to my mother. (The noun form of “thank” should be “thanks” instead of “thankness”)(2) I am feeling tearable which I am writing this letter. (The suffixation rule which adjective can be created by adding able is misused here.)(3) It was when I thought to express my love, respectation and thanks to you that I always couldnt help crying. (Here the writer wanted to use the word “respect”, but he misused the formation of the noun.)3.2.2 Semantic errorsSemantic errors include redundancy, ambiguous word and synonym misuse. This kind of error is brought about by students who are not familiar with the specific meanings of the words that they misused.(1) Redundancy or repetitionIt is the kind of error that words or phrases that have the same or similar meaning appear at the same time in one sentence. For example,(1) Gray hair appears on the head and hunchback appears too. (Hair cannot appear on other parts of the body, so “on the head” is not necessary here)(2) When Im crying, you help me to wipe my tears on my face. (The same error with example 1)(3) However, you still had a great confidence in every one of us.(“Every one” is good enough to express the meaning; “every one of us” is redundancy.)(2) Ambiguous words or phrasesDue to the social and cultural differences of China and the English-speaking countries, the same word or phrase may have different associative meanings in different cultures. Therefore, students who do not know the implying meaning of the words will misuse them in their writings. For example,(1) Every night my mother will stay in my room and study with me. Here the writer means his mother will accompany him when he is studying, his mother isnt studying. “Study with” is ambiguous in this sentence.(2) My parents gave me life and fed me up. “Bringup” should be used instead of “feedup” in this sentence.(3) I play together, eat together, study together and sleep together with my best friend. “sleepwith” does not have the meaning “livewith”. It has the implication of “sexual relationship” which can be greatly misunderstood. Therefore, it should be used very carefully. (3) Synonym misuseAs shown in the two tables, compared with the other subcategory errors, synonym misuse takes the second largest proportion (15.1%) of the word misuses in this study. In the researcher opinion, it is the matter of literal translation when students chose words in their compositions. They did not consider the specific context of the words, which had the similar meaning with the proper words. For example,(1) Theres a person who knows me very well, although sometimes I dont comprehend her. “comprehend a passage” can be used, but “comprehend a person” is not appropriate.(2) You hope that I could go to a good college to help you complete your dream. “Fulfill” is more suitable in this sentence.(3) You teach me how to do a real person. “Be” should be used instead of “do”.(4) Two years ago, your fingers hurt, because you had touched too many chemicals. “burned” is more native than “hurt”. “chemical burns” is much more used than“chemical hurt” in native English.3.2.3 Syntactic errorsSyntactic errors include misuses of the part of speech, inconsistency of tenses, incorrect collocations and omissions.(1) Misuse of part of speechIn Chinese, the forms of nouns, verbs and adjectives are not changed when their part of speech are converted. However, English has the different grammatical rule. Some affixes are needed when the derivations take place. Students who are not familiar with the different forms of the same word will misuse them. Examples,(1) You make the house full of love and everyone in the family lives colorfuland comfortable. “Colorful” and “comfortable” are misused as the adverb. “Colorfully” and “comfortably” are the correct forms.(2) I am so regret that I cant forgive myself. The adjective of regret should be regretful.(3) You think that the capable of independence is very important.“capable” is an adjective. Its noun form “capability” is needed here.(2) Inconsistency of tenseBesides the carelessness of students, there are still other factors to cause the misappropriations of tenses. According to Cais study (Cai Jinting, 19-21), tense variation in second language acquisition is constrained by many factors, among which linguistic factors are very prominent. The five intralingual factors (verb salience, lexical aspect, temporal adverbials, clause types, and narrative structure) and one interlingual factor, the Chinese aspect marker le, influence the tense acquisition, especially simple past in English. For example,(1) While I was had an injection, I can see that you were so painful in your heart. (could)(2) That night we had already fallen asleep. A rushed ring wakes us up suddenly. (woke)(3) When I woke up one morning, I suddenly see the light turned on in the kitchen. (saw)(3) Incorrect collocationMisuses of prepositional phrase and verb phrase belong to this error. For example,(1) In the last, I want to say it again.The correct form should be “in the end”.(2) Under your help, I became braver and braver.“With your help” is the appropriate form.(3) As going up day-by-day, one day I suddenly found that both of you aregetting older and older. “Growing up” should be us