A Study On English Composition Errors Of Senior School Students

Writing, as an important skill of output, is indispensable for EFL learning. However, both the Chinese senior school students and their English teachers find it very difficult and demanding. It is not surprising that various language errors appear frequently in students'compositions and they are caused by different factors. Thus, the studies focusing on the analysis of writing production errors become more and more important and necessary.As error analysis (EA) developed after contrastive analysis (CA) being criticized, many researchers and linguists shared great interest in the errors of the learners. They believe that errors often indicate learners'inside system of interlanguage (IL), through which they may investigate the learning processes, and get further understanding and acknowledgements of foreign language teaching (FLT) and second language teaching (SLT). In theory, error analysis plays an important role not only in English teaching activities, but also in searching for laws of learning English and improving English learning. It offers help and guide for teachers so that they can deal with learner's error appropriately. However, in practice, many foreign language teachers don't lay enough emphasis on it. They either correct every error or ignore the error thoroughly. Both the attitudes to errors are imperfect. To take advantage of EA, the teachers should endeavor to perceive various language errors and manage language errors by right means in their teaching process.Former researches on writing focused on how to teach writing skill in class and foster students'writing ability. It is true that many researches on error analysis pay more attention to college students'composition, while fewer researches on writing errors focus on senior school students; what's more, in former researches, teachers would collect students'writing errors from different sources during a long period of the studying process. This thesis focuses on errors students make in limited time and place.Based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the present study has analyzed the sampled errors and explored the causes of errors. The study focuses on 1109 grade one students'writing section from the first month English exam in No.3 middle school, Zaozhuang city. All the examination papers are collected and evaluated by the seven English teachers in charge of Grade One. Then the author collected 154 compositions from two classes as the subjects of the study, the marks of the writing and its distribution were presented and analyzed, the causes of the errors were explored and discussed.The result shows that errors on lexical (e.g. verb and article errors) and grammatical levels (e.g. collocation errors) have been found most prominent in terms of frequency and proportion. Girls are more likely to achieve higher scores than boys in percentage. Simultaneously based on the results of the study, some pedagogical suggestions are put forward. It is believed that English teachers should take the enlargement of vocabulary and mastery of English grammar rules as an essential task and the differences between L 1 and L2 should be paid attention to. Therefore, to improve writing, students should not ignore grammatical and lexical errors. The author also stresses the importance of productive language learning activities. For students, they can improve their writing by writing practice, enlarging their vocabulary and grasping the organization of English grammar. Reading and reciting as chief ways of language input are inherently related to writing which can certainly improve EFL learners'instinctive feeling for the language as well as enlighten the writers'train of thought. Besides, writing and checking in cooperative groups is a good method of improving writing and correcting errors. The avoidance of syntactic errors in writing is another problem that should be stressed, especially the use of conjunction, the avoidance of repetition, addition, and omission. Further, culture factors also affect students'writing, so cultural knowledge should be one composing part of the writing class. In brief, to improve skills in writing communication, students require a high level of linguistic competence as well as a corresponding level of pragmatic competence.Through this research, the author tries to provide a better approach to correcting the errors and give teachers and students some help by classifying and explaining the collected errors students made in limited time and space. The author believes that the errors a learner makes can provide important evidence for us to draw out the system of the language that he is using (i.e. has learned) at a particular point in the course. By unfurling different errors, the author draws a conclusion that the errors senior high students made are mainly on language-level. This offers teachers and students important evidence that they should put a lot emphasis on language-level learning and try to improve the skills of using language.The present research has been carried out in limited conditions, so it will remain to be perfected. However, it is sincerely hoped that the present study can shed light on English writing teaching and learning, and at the same time, it can pave the way to more penetrating and profound studies in the future.