The Tendencies of Overpassivisation and Overuse of Be Verbs in the Writing of Chinese Learners of English and Applications for Practice

This chapter examines how Chinese learners of English formulate verbal phrases in expository writing using a learner corpus. Among 1,541 extracted overpassivised cases, the misuse of unaccusative verbs accounted for 45%, followed by transitive verbs (24%) and copular be verbs (19%), all of which were higher than that of unergative verbs (10%). The distribution of errors in unaccusative verbs remained consistent in beginners and intermediate groups, indicating that the overpassivisation tendency is persistent in the course of mastery of English. The most conspicuous error in transitive verbs was found in object relative clauses. The most common error in the copular be verb was made in object complements and in the past tense. Based on these findings, a hands-on activity is provided to collectively address different verbal types used in various sentence structures as pedagogical effort.