Chenli Shen

1. Introduction

International Schools are established to provide convenience for children of foreign personnel to receive education. The number of international schools in Shanghai is currently 32, but it was 5 in 1995. Except some monolingual school like Shanghai Japanese school, the main teaching language in international schools is English. During English language learning classes, students receive different education according to their levels.

This study mainly focuses on the standard-level non-native English students in one international school called Shanghai High School International Division.(SHSID) Although having been studying in English-based curriculum for long time, the learners still need to improve their oral proficiency to express themselves. Furthermore, the language teachers perpetually face the problem of their diversified language and cultural background.

Error analysis has long been the tool to identify learners errors and to obtain learners difficulties in language learning since Corder in 1967. In this paper, the author has collected some data from Asian English learners in SHSID. Through error analysis, the purpose of this study is to find the common errors committed by Asian English learners in oral English and to examine whether there is significant co-relationship between the frequency of common errors and their language background, and their length of study in international schools. The result of the study may give some hint to the further oral English teaching to diversified students.

2. The Study

2.1 Subjects

The subjects are 21 Asian students studying in the same standard level of English class in Grade 11 (age 16) in SHSID. Their family language is not English, but they all have received English-based education in international schools for some years. They have different language background, different length of studying English, and different study experience in international school.

2.2 Method

Oral tests were used to collect data. The subjects were required to finish the independent speaking task in TOEFL iBT test. They read the topic first, had one minute for preparation time, and had another one minute to response. The topics require them to give descriptions of people, places and things that they are familiar with.

All their answers were recorded and transcribed into literal materials. According to the TOEFL iBT scoring rubric, the speaking score will refer to three parts: delivery of speech, language use and topic development. However, this study focuses on the errors in language use and topic development, but not on the delivery of speech. In other word, the authors main concern is grammatical and lexical error.

3. Data Analysis and Findings

3.1 Error Identification and Classification

Table 1 The grammatical errors

Category Description Examples

Omissions The absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance Science fictions that include many make young children feel boring.

Misinformation The use of wrong form morpheme or structure Our environments become bad and bad.

Repetition Former word that cause a stop in an utterance We cant cant…torture the hotness of summer.

Taking the current collected oral English data into account, the grammatical errors are classified into three categories: omissions, misinformation, and repetition. The detailed classification is seen on Table 1.

Misinformation error is sill unavoidable for the subjects.19 out of 22 students made this kind of error, which can be classified into five categories: 1.pronoun 2.adjective 3.verb 4.noun and 5.conjunction. 59% of the misinformation errors originate from the wrong form of verbs. Apart from tense error, they also confuse with modal verb usage in their oral performance. The second prominent error is adjective-noun misunderstanding. Instead of using noun form, they may use adjective form. For example, “experience the cold outside” and “it is every persons responsible”

Half of the subjects commit omission error. They missed the adjective part most frequently. As to repetition, no matter where they from, they tend to repeat I and I think in utterances.

In lexical aspect, cohesive lexicon are prominently omitted or repeated.

3.2 Errors and Study Experience

The Pearson Correlation was used to measure the relationship between error frequency and study experience. It indicates there is no relationship between error frequency and the length in international schools. However, the longer time of learning English, the less error student committed. (r=-0.601)

4. Implication

Verb usage and cohesive lexicon should be emphasized more in oral English teaching. Teachers may give Japanese students extra chance to practice oral English, since they started learning English later than other students.

References:

[1]Corder,S.P(1967).The significance in language errors.International Review of Applied Linguistics,14,557-584.