Error Analysis Of Senior Middle School Students’ English Writing

As an output skill in English,writing not only reflects one’s level of knowledge and thinking ability,but also is a comprehensive reflection of other skills in English.It represents the flexible application of knowledge learned from books and is a comprehensive expression of students’ English language knowledge and skills.Throughout the college entrance exams and various major exams,English writing has an extraordinary status as well.The General High School English Curriculum Standard（Revised Edition 2020）puts forward the concept of “subject core literacy”,which raises the “learning ability” of learners to a higher level and emphasizes that teachers should make the cultivation of students’ learning ability a key task in the teaching process.Therefore,improving students’ writing skills and developing students’ learning ability is one of the important teaching tasks for teachers.However,during the author’s educational internship,it is found that the current situation of English writing teaching in senior school is not optimistic.Great majority of students consider that the writing of English is challenging,and the writing part is often easily ignored by teachers.Many problems such as many errors and low scores in students’ English composition make English writing both a difficult and weak point in English learning.Based on Pit Corder’s error analysis theory,this paper presents analysis of quantitative and qualitative about senior school students’ English writing errors through three research tools:questionnaires,interviews and material,using 140 students from Grade One in XX No.1 Senior High School,XX Province as the research subjects.Through material analysis,various errors in students’ English essays are collected and organized,and the types of students’ writing errors are classified and analyzed;through the interview and questionnaire,the causes of the errors are analyzed at the levels of teachers and students respectively,and targeted countermeasures and suggestions for avoiding errors in senior school English writing are put forward.This research is aimed at solving 2 questions below:（1）What types of errors are often found in senior school students’ English writing?（2）What are the causes of errors in English writing for senior school students?The results of the study show that,firstly,the major types of the errors which existed in the English writing samples of senior school students are in four areas: technical errors,vocabularylevel errors,sentence-level errors and other levels;among them,vocabulary-level errors are the type with the highest number of errors,accounting for 44.96% of the four types of errors.Secondly,the causes of English writing errors are: at the student level,mainly the interference of the native language,insufficient mastery of vocabulary and grammar,and individual differences;at the teacher level,mainly the overly utilitarian purpose of teaching,insufficient teaching time for writing lessons,and the single mode of writing teaching and evaluating.Based on this,this paper proposes countermeasures and suggestions to avoid errors in senior school English writing.For example,teachers should consolidate students’ knowledge of English writing,create an English environment for students’ writing,enrich the content of English writing teaching,and diversify the way of composition evaluation.Students should strengthen the accumulation of basic language knowledge,read widely to expand their vocabulary,and pay attention to writing training and the cultivation of writing habits.This study hopes to provide more inspirations and reflections for English writing teaching in senior school,improve students’ writing condition,reduce students’ errors in English writing,and improve senior school students’ English writing ability.