Syntactic Error Analysis On The Writings Of Non-English Majors

As we all know that it is very important and difficult for foreign language learners to develop their abilities to write. Many Chinese students make errors in their English writings, and most of them are the syntactic errors. So many people have made some researches on syntax, especially about the theoretical explorations,such as Plato, Saussure and Chomsky. But they seldom associated these theoretical explorations with practical writings. There are also some scholars who have done some empirical researches about students'writings, such as Zou Qiujuan and Zhang Yimin. But most of the researches were about all the errors in the whole English writings, few of them were particularly about syntactic errors in writings. So the author tries to do an empirical research about syntactic error analysis on the writings of non-English majors with three questions: What kinds of syntactic errors can non-English majors make in their writings? What are the sources of these syntactic errors? What can we do to deal with the errors in English Learning and Teaching?Error Analysis theory was its theoretical guidance in the research; it became the acceptable alternative to Contrastive Analysis by the late 1960s and got rapid development in the 1970s. Corder holds that there are five stages for Error Analysis: selection of a corpus of language; identification of errors in the corpus; classification of the errors identified; explanation of the psycholinguistic sources of the errors; evaluation or error gravity ranking of the errors. The author does the research following the five stages.The method used in the research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative studies, with empirical study is dominant and descriptive study serves as an important supplement; and data collection instruments used in the research are sample writings and interview. There are three hypotheses in this thesis: There are two main syntactic errors in the non-English majors'English writings: syntactic transfer errors and intralingual errors, among which syntactic transfer errors account for the most part. There are four sources of the syntactic errors in the writings: syntactic transfer, intralingual interference, communication strategy and nonlinguistic interference;There are some ways to reduce the syntactic errors: learning the English thinking pattern, improving students'reading, listening and speaking skills and strengthening the learning strategies.In the last part, two findings and pedagogical implications came out after the analysis of sample writings and interview.It is hoped that the research may be helpful to both English learners in China to increase their writing ability and improve their language proficiency and English teachers in China in tackling students'writing errors and making adjustments in their teaching methods.