An Analysis On Errors Made By Senior High School Students In English Writing And Some Pedagogical Suggestions

Language teachers are inevitably confronted with various production errors made by students in the course of teaching. Among them, writing error is a major sort. Though much research has been done on the errors in EFL learners'writings, studies of the errors made by senior high school students are still insufficient especially in the Chinese ESL context. This thesis tries to explore the common linguistic errors of the Chinese senior high school students'writings.This thesis, with Error Analysis (EA), Contrastive Analysis (CA), and Interlanguage (IL) as its theoretical guidance, analyzes 90 compositions written in the same period of time and of the same topic by Year 12 students in Weiyu High School in Xuhui District, Shanghai. Altogether 696 errors are identified. Then, a classification of the errors is made first, followed by a discussion of the factors leading to the errors.The analysis shows that interlingual and intralingual errors are two major types, with the former playing a more prominent role than the latter. Interlingual error refers to the error due to transferring rules from mother tongue, including linguistic transfer, cultural transfer, and thought pattern transfer. While intralingual error is caused by the faulty or partial learning of one item of the TL upon another. And in this thesis, the sources of the intralingual error are usually discussed in the categories of overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, and incomplete application of rules and false concept hypothesized.Following the analysis and discussion, relevant error correction methods and some pedagogical suggestions are put forward.Hopefully, the study will be of help to both language teachers and language learners in senior high schools.