The Survey Of High School Students' Proficiency In English Proofreading

English proofreading is a comprehensive language testing item that contains grammatical knowledge and language skills.It tests not only students' ability to use English correctly and comprehensively but also their ability to find and judge errors.It also examines their ability to think independently and analyze problems.All these are the core aptitude needed in senior high schools.Therefore,it is important to investigate students' proficiency of English proofreading and provide specific strategies according to the problems in their English proofreading.The researcher chose 120 senior students from Hong'an Third Middle School as subjects,held the proofreading tests twice in order to measure their proficiency of English proofreading from morphology,syntax and logic,and made semi-structured interview with them to understand their attitude toward English proofreading.The research gets the following results:(1)Students' comprehensive proficiency in English proofreading is not optimistic.The average scores of two English proofreading tests are 2.66(out of 10)and 3.98(out of 10).In these three parts,their proofreading proficiency in morphology is higher than that in syntax and logic.Moreover,the correlation coefficients between English proofreading scores and their English test scores are 0.713 and 0.745,which shows highly positive correlation;and their R-squares are 0.509 and 0.555,which indicates that their comprehensive proficiency of English proofreading can reflect their English proficiency.(2)The average scores of two English proofreading tests of students with high scores are both over 3 points higher than those of the students with low scores.The calculated statistic of the independent-sample T test on Test One is 12.752,with a significance level of 0.000;while that on Test Two is 9.905,with a significance level of 0.000,which indicates that the proficiency differences in two proofreading tests between students with high scores and students with low scores are obvious.Especially in syntax and logical,the proofreading proficiency of students with high scores is higher than students with low scores.In the further discussion of the survey results,the author found that there are four problems in their English proofreading: students' language knowledge is not comprehensive and systematic;they are lack of textual awareness;language transfer is serious in their English proofreading and they employ learning strategies infrequently.According to the results of investigation and discussion,this paper puts forward four strategies:(1)improving grammatical structures;(2)strengthening textual awareness;(3)subtracting negative transfer of language;(4)enhancing learning strategies.