| Summary: | 博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 96 === This study is basically pedagogical. It aims to analyze the error types of the English verb forms and verb complementation patterns committed by Taiwanese EFL students in order to find out the students’ difficulties with this area of grammar learning. Its purpose is to identify the possible factors for committing such kinds of errors, to understand the strategies taken by the EFL students in the process of writing, to investigate the differences between the error frequencies made by students with different levels of language proficiency, and to suggest a proper way to improve or adjust the grammar and composition teaching in EFL classrooms. The subjects were composed of 1,076 Taiwanese EFL students. A total of 1,076 short essays were collected, and for data analysis 948 compositions were selected. They were assessed through inter-rater grading and then divided into three groups with different levels of writing ability or language proficiency. All the errors found in the corpus were classified into three main categories: errors with finite verbs, errors with non-finite verbs, and errors with verb complementation patterns. Then these three major error types were sub-classified into subcategories. The analysis work focused on four points of the finite verbs: tense, aspect, voice, and mood; three areas of non-finite verbs: infinitives, gerunds and participles; and six major verb complementation patterns: intransitive verb patterns, monotrasitive verb patterns, ditransitive verb patterns, complex-intransitive or copular verb patterns, complex-transitive verb patterns, and multi-word verb patterns. The analysis results show that the forms and patterns that have complex rules or are more marked in the target language (TL) enjoy relatively higher error frequencies and are generally more difficult for Taiwanese EFL writers. Such results appear to conform to Eckman’s Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman, 1977), which says that a TL form will be difficult to learn if it is different from the corresponding L1 form, and if the TL form is marked or more marked while the L1 form is unmarked or less marked. The analysis results also show that L1 transfer appears to be one of the most important factors for committing writing errors. However, cross-linguistic influence is not the sole factor for EFL learners’ errors. Some errors probably are due to the intralingual complexities of the verb system, the syntactic rule, and the semantic implication of the target language. Other errors seem to be caused by the learning or communication strategies employed by the EFL writers, including avoidance, analogy, simplification, hypercorrection, and overgeneralization. Still others are probably caused by students’ insufficient practice or induced by improper ways in which EFL teachers give examples and arrange practice opportunities. Multiple comparisons among the error frequency counts across groups show that students with high-level language proficiency made significantly lower error frequencies than those with middle-level proficiency, who in turn made significantly lower error frequencies than those with low-level proficiency in most categories and subcategories of verb constructions. Analysis results indicates that EFL writers with higher language proficiency encountered relatively less difficulty with most surface-level forms and patterns than those with lower proficiency. Finally, pedagogical implications were provided, and proper ways of reducing each error type were suggested. It is hoped that the present study will encourage all the fellow EFL instructors to move in the same direction so that we can achieve a final breakthrough in our efforts to solve the problem of the learning in both verb forms and verb complements. Key Words: verb complementation, learning strategy, finite verbs, non-finite verbs, Markedness Differential Hypothesis, L1 transfer, avoidance, analogy, simplification, hypercorrection, overgeneralization
|
|---|
