英语论文网

1.1 Research Background研究背景
Tense is an essential category of English grammar, and the acquisition of www.51lunwen.org tense isone of the most important and difficult parts in English learning. Since Chinese is oftenregarded as the tense-less language for its lack of verbal inflections to indicate distinctionsof times, it usually poses many problems for the English learners of China when acquiringthe English tense. Tense is also a difficult task for other second and foreign languagelearners of English. Thus it is of great necessity and importance to investigate into theusage of English tense in inter-language so as to shed light on tense teaching and learning.Linguists have so far conducted a great many of researches on English tense fromvarious perspectives, most of which are theoretical studies with a viewpoint for guidingtense learning. (Liu, 2008, p14) Recently, concern of the investigation into the Englishtense in inter-language has been raised. Studies on English tense use in inter-languagehave revealed that learners with different native language background tend to errdifferently in the use of target language tense. (Cai, 2002, p.109)Based on the review of related literature, most of the previous empirical studies areconducted among the native speakers of European languages, who learned English inEnglish-speaking countries. As far as the present study concerns, although someresearches have been conducted to explore the English tense errors committed by ChineseEnglish learners, they either focused on one or two particular tense or concerned only asmall-scale database. Besides, in despite of the significant distinction between English andChinese in the expression of temporality, there should still be some patterns of errorcharacteristics for the Chinese-speaking English learners in the non-English speakingenvironment. Accordingly, this thesis adopts two sub-corpora (ST3 and ST4) of ChineseLearner English Corpus (CLEC) and 150 English compositions from the 2010-2011sophomore final exam papers of Shanxi Normal University as the source of data, employsthe sixteen-tense system by Bo Bing and the theory of Error Analysis (EA) as theoreticalsupport, focuses on the analysis of distribution and major types of tense errors and aims toexamine the distinction of tense use between ST3 and ST4, and between ST3 and 150compositions.

1.2 Research Objectives and Significance研究目标和意义
The thesis aims to identify, classify and analyze the English tense errors committedby Chinese college non-English major students on the basis of the large authentic datacollected in CLEC as well as in the sophomore final exam papers of Shanxi NormalUniversity. The following are the specific research questions to be discussed in the presentstudy:What are the patterns of tense error distribution among the 16 English tenses inChinese college non-English major students’ writing? Are the characteristics of errordistribution the same with regard to the two sub-corpora, ST3 and ST4? Do they change?If they do, how do they change? Which of the 16 tenses is the most problematic tense inthe writing of Chinese college non-English major students?What are the patterns of tense error distribution among the 16 English tenses in the150 English compositions of the 2010-2011 sop