Error Analysis On English Writing Of High School Students

As one of the five major skills in language learning,English writing level is related to learners’ comprehensive ability,and improving English writing level is the focus of foreign language teaching and research.The New English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools formulated by the Ministry of Education in 2017 has further requirements for senior high school students on English writing,and clearly points out that written competence should be possessed by every qualified middle school student.However,writing has always been a weak part in English education for high school.Wang Chuming points out that errors in writing texts are the ‘entry point of exploring the black box of the brain’ and they are also the entrance to know the difficulties and obstacles of students’ English writing.Based on this,the author has made this study,aiming at making teachers and students be better to understand the rules of errors in English writing,so they can adopt appropriate strategies to improve writing teaching and studying through error analysis.Error Analysis originated in the 1960 s,although it has become an important field of second language acquisition after more than half a century of development,it has not formally entered the middle school.By interviewing with teachers and students,the author finds that most of them know little about the theory of Error Analysis or even have never heard about it at all.Starting from Contrastive Analysis,Interlanguage Theory and Error Analysis,this thesis studied errors through the five-step method put forward by a linguist,Corder,S.P..In this study,100 English compositions collected in a mid-term exam of Kashi No.2 Middle School were used as the corpus.At the same time,based on the actual situation of students’ compositions and the classification of Carl James(2001),the errors are classified into four categories,namely,substance errors,lexical errors,grammar errors and discourse errors,and they are subdivided into several branches.The thesis aims to solve the following problems: 1.Statistics on the number of errors in a certain English writing;2.Classification and explanation of these errors;3.Exploring the deep-seated causes of errors through questionnaire and interview;4.Instructional implications are put forward from both teaching and learning aspects to enrich the errors corpus and provide enlightenment.In this study,1363 errors are collected,most of which are grammar errors,accounting for49% of the total number of errors.The other three categories accounts for almost the same proportion.253 substance errors are collected,accounting for 18% of the total errors;lexicalerrors are 230,accounting for 17%;discourse errors are 216,and the proportion is about 16%.Substance errors refer to the errors on the surface of language caused by the memory problems of second language learners or the lack of attention.As long as learners review carefully,most substance errors can be avoided.Substance errors can be divided into punctuation errors,capitalization errors and misspelling.Among them,misspelling has the highest proportion,accounting for 56% of the total substance errors.Lexical errors include misuse of words,misuse of part-of-speech and collocational errors.Collocational errors accounts for 51% of the total lexical errors,which are reflected mostly in the use of articles.Because there are no articles in Chinese,students cannot tell when to use articles or how to use them correctly.Grammar is the rule for grouping sentences,involving a wide range of aspects,so this category is subdivided according to the real types of students’ errors occurred.A total of 7 subcategories and 664 grammar errors were collected,accounting for about half of the total errors,which should be highly valued by teachers and students.Discourse errors include chinglish,errors in sentence cohesion and semantic coherence,etc.Among them,chinglish has the highest proportion,up to76% of the total number of discourse errors.Firstly,because of the insufficient language accumulation,high school students cannot find a more appropriate expression within their scope of knowledge.Secondly,because high school students lack the habit of reading authentic original English materials,they have not formed the way of English thinking.Errors are unavoidable in second language acquisition,and they can reflect the true level of students,they are hypothesis of students’ application of target language,and through the verification of the hypothesis,problems can be found and progress can be made.In order to find out the deep-seated causes of students’ writing errors,the author discusses from four aspects based on the results of error analysis.To begin with,these four categories of errors are discussed from the perspective of interlingual transfer.Furthermore,students’ errors are analyzed from the perspective of intralingual transfer.Then,the author finds out some causes through questionnaire from students.At last,through interview with teachers,some causes are analyzed from the perspective of teaching.Based on the causes reflected in this study,the author puts forward some instructional implications for teachers.Above all,systematic training on writing teaching and error analysis related theories should be carried out for teachers.Teachers should set up a correct view of errors and adopt different attitudes according to the types of students’ errors.Moreover,teachers should consolidate students’ basic knowledge,and combine error analysis to adjust their teaching schedule according to the number and proportion of errors.In addition,teachers should apply the process approach to writing and attach great importance to every link.For example,beforewriting,the detailed rules for grading and the differences between Chinese and English punctuation should be taught;while writing,teachers should guide students to outline before creation;after writing,error analysis should be combined to give effective feedback.Instructional implications for students are as follows.To start with,students should discover the category of errors that accounts for the highest proportion in their writing under the guidance of teachers,and building up confidence.Then,students should make good use of multimedia to make up for the shortage of classroom teaching.For example,students who have many grammar errors can watch micro-lectures or MOOC to master the grammar rules,and students with insufficient vocabulary can use word softwares which combine multiple memory modes and forgetting curve to make vocabulary memory more efficient.Besides,students should pay attention to learning strategies.For instance,students are supposed to select English reading materials which are slightly more difficult than those they can understand;a notebook for error correction should be prepared and the errors in compositions should be analyzed vertically and horizontally to gradually improve their English level.