Sentence Fragments in Chinese EFL Students' Writing

Based on corpus, English sentence fragment belongs to one of the four major types of syntactic errors committed by Chinese students in their English compositions. It is found that sn2-1, sn2-3 and sn2-4 are three the sub-types of sentence fragments committed most frequently by Chinese EFL students. The negative transfer of the native language habits and differences in thinking modes between the two cultures might be the major factors for the frequent occurrence of sentence fragments in Chinese EFL learners' writing. A further classification of sentence fragment errors followed by an in-depth analysis of the underlying factors is significant for both EFL teaching and learning in China.