A Study Of Senior High School English Writing Errors Based On Corpus

Writing plays an very important role in the current English Teaching in senior high schools in China.Through writing,students’ comprehensive ability of using English can be displayed directly.In the new curriculum standard for senior high schoolissued by the Ministry of education of China,it is not only clearly proposed that senior high school students should be able to write at least 80 to 100 words of composition in English,but also required that there should be no obvious grammatical errors,and that the semantics should be coherent,the overall structure of the article should be fluent and the cohesion should be appropriate.This requirement reflects the importance of high school English writing and the necessity of improving English writing ability.However,at present,high school students’ writing scores are still low and their writing ability is weak.Most English teachers do not pay enough attention to the cultivation of writing ability.In addition,students’ English writing ability is far from the standard required by the new curriculum standard.In recent years,researchers at home and abroad try to analyze students’ writing errors through corpus resources and tools,hoping to find out the causes of students’ writing errors and provide more efficient writing teaching strategies.The research questions of this study are as follows: 1)What are the types of high frequency errors in senior high school English writing? 2)Are the high frequency errors in English writing the same among senior high school students of different grades? If different,is there a significant difference? 3)What are the reasons for high school students’ writing errors? Based on the theories of error analysis and interlanguage,this study uses the methods of statistics and corpus analysis to investigate the high school students’ errors in English writing.This research collects three grades’ compositions of a high school in Xianyang(one hundred for each grade,a total of three hundred)to analyzes and discusses the causes of the errors by building a small corpus and combining with the five steps of error analysis proposed by Corder,so as to help English teachers better guide the high school students in writing practice and further improve Students’ writing ability.Through the analysis by using corpus tools and SPSS software,this study finds that: 1)High frequency errors in high school English writing are mainly in morphology,syntax,lexical use,phrasal verbs and phrasal nouns;2)High school students of different grades have different writing errors with high frequency and significant differences(F=6.955,P < 0.05)3)There are two main reasons for high school students’ English writing errors :1.Negative transfer of mother tongue;2.Lack of English language knowledge and skills.