ERIC Number: EJ1079495
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Jun
Pages: 4
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1916-4742
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
A Corpus-Based Study of the Infinitive Errors Made by Chinese College Students
Xia, Lixin
English Language Teaching, v5 n6 p154-157 Jun 2012
The paper discusses the infinitive errors made by Chinese college students. From the CLEC, all infinitive errors tagged as [vp5] are collected, and then the general distribution of the errors among 4 groups of college students is shown. Moreover, these errors are classified into 12 categories according to the characteristics of the usage. After manual classification, we can see the main distribution features of these errors clearly. The most common infinitive errors fall into the category of "doing?do", i.e. misuses of a gerund where a base verb should be used. It is surprised to find that the category of "do?did/done" ranks the second in the number of errors in the CLEC in which case Chinese learners use the structure of "to + the past tense or past participle of a verb" in their written works. Finally, possible causes of these errors are given and ways to avoid them are suggested.
Descriptors: Computational Linguistics, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Error Analysis (Language), Asians, Classification, College Students, Verbs, Morphemes, Interlanguage, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China
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