An Analysis Of The Common Errors In High School Students’ Writing

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are the four skills of the learners as well as the fourapproaches to English learning,but writing is attached more and more importance in English teaching andlearning in High School,which can be easily found from the increasing scores of the writing part in theCollege Entrance Examination. Although English compositions written by High school students are notlong, it reflects the learners’ difficulties in their learning and confusions related to adopted strategies oncethey are faced with trouble. Besides,writing is a means of English output so it should be valued by all thelearners.Now most teachers have really found the errors so frequently arising in students’ English writingbut there are still no effective solutions. Therefore, it is quite necessary and urgent for us to find outefficient ways to help the learners.Although previously some relevant researches were carried out,most of them were only concernedwith errors made by English majors,college students, or junior middle school students. In fact few referredto the errors in high school students’ compositions,if any, they are only about the students of Grade One orGrade Two rather than the students all through the three grades.So this research is very special,which isabout the same students form Grade One to Grade Three.Based on the two theories including ContrastiveAnalysis and Error Analysis,this research managed to find the common features belonging to the errorsappearing in the high school students’ writing and find out the roots of the errors by analyzing andunderstanding those errors.Meanwhile, the research illustrates that different attitudes should be takentowards different types of errors. In the study students’ writing errors have been divided into threecategories according to the forming differences: one is called “memory errors” here, which are mainlycaused by the fact that students can’t clearly memorize the English words or even misunderstand thespeeches of the English words; Another is called “diagnostic errors”,which come from the differentgrammar rules of the two languages English and Chinese; The other is “forming errors”,which occur inthe course of forming target language English.The study began from the second semester of2009, which lasted three years in No.22Middle School inWenzhou. One hundred students of Class eleven and Class Twelve were randomly selected to accept thisstudy（in fact all the two hundred students can represent the average writing level of the whole grade）. Twohundred compositions from their two exams were analyzed,then eight hundred and forty-eigh（tthis numbercomes from adding all the errors in students’ compositions, including some similar ones） errors wereclassified.The study of the errors has found the following results: Firstly, the common errors in the CollegeEntrance Exam are similar to those appearing in Grade One students’ writing; Secondly, most errors resultfrom “Chinese English”, which mirrors that mother tongue is still confusing them terribly;Thirdly,interlingual errors (errors caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue) are more than intralingualones(errors caused by the target language itself). Meanwhile, after contrasting one hundred compositions written by Grade one students and one hundred compositions written by Grade three students,the studyeasily finds that most of their errors are invariant as eight hundred and forty-eight is almost equal to sevenhundred and fifty-six.Then by the means of interviewing the students and asking students to finish theprepared questionnaires, the possible aspects leading to the stubborn phenomenon in making mistakes havebeen discovered,at the same time the teachers in my team have all been involved in the research on how tosolve the problem with the purpose of making students’ writing errors from few to none. Here the roots ofthe errors have been studied and according to the study different errors require us teachers and students tocorrect them in quite different ways,which is suggested by the analysis of the collected errors.The present paper mainly consists of six parts.The first part is its introduction,which mentions thebackground, the aim of the research and the meanings of the research.The second part is the literaturereview,which includes different viewpoints of the linguists in and abroad.The third part is the theoreticalbases including Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis.The fourth part is the design of thisresearch,which mainly talks about the procedures of the research.The fifth part is the results of theresearch. In this part all the collected errors are classified and analyzed and different correcting approachesare offered.The last part is the findings,teaching suggestions and the research’s limits included.