Error Analysis On The English Writing Of English Major Students In Vocational College

English writing is the most difficult one in the four basic skills "listening, speaking, reading and writing". We can also know one’s real English level from English writing. Chinese students have a lot of problems in English writing, and we can find many errors in their writing. They are afraid of writing and also do not know how to write. The reason is that many teachers do not pay much attention to the teaching of English writing and the students do not have enough guidance from their teachers. At the same time, English learners are not very familiar with the features of English. In addition, they do not master English grammar that well. These are the reasons why English writing is so difficult for Chinese students. As an important branch of linguistics, Error Analysis plays an important role in second language teaching and learning. It can help teachers realize that errors are significant in English teaching and learning. Teachers can find the causes of the errors by analyzing them. Then teachers can know the students’problems better. This can help them to learn how to teach English better in class.This paper is based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis, Interlanguage and Error Analysis. The subjects of the study are100sophomores majored in English from Ezhou Polytechnic. The author collected300samples of the writings and classified the errors. This paper adopts James’(2001) classification of errors, and these errors are classified into five categories:substance errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors, discourse errors and Chinglish. Through the statistical analysis of these errors, the result of the study shows that the most frequent errors are lexical errors and grammatical errors. Next the author tries to find the causes of the errors by interviewing the teachers and the students separately. At last, according to the errors, the statistical analysis and the result of the interview, the reasons of the errors will be further analyzed and discussed. And the result shows that interlingual errors and intralingual errors are the two main causes. Meanwhile, the former appears more frequent than the latter. Interlingual errors are mainly caused by the negative transfer of the mother tongue, while intralingual errors are caused by the faulty or partial learning of one item of the target language upon another. And the sources of intralingual errors are usually discussed in the categories of overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules and false concept hypothesized. Besides the above two sources, the other reasons are the context of learning, communication, personal factors and the cultural factors and so on. The final purpose of Error analysis is not only to find out the causes of errors but to know how to correct them and prevent the students from committing the same type of errors. In this paper, the author presents three types of error correction, and they are self-correction, peer correction and teacher correction. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of each type are discussed respectively. And at the same time, some suggestions for English teaching and learning will be given at the end of this paper.