Error Analysis On Non-English Majors' Compositions

Language learning is a hard and repeated process in which language learners will unavoidably commit errors. It is just as Dulay and Burt(1974:95)claimed,"one can not learn without goofing."Writing is a comprehensive reflection of students'English language application. However, in English learning and teaching, teachers and students consider that writing is the most difficult problem because English and Chinese belong to two different language families. There are great differences at the level of grammar, syntax and culture. Therefore, errors in writing have become a hot issue and have drawn researchers'and teachers'attention.Error Analysis(EA) is an important branch in applied linguistics and plays a key role in the second language learning. Through investigation of the errors occurred in students'writings, teachers can know better about the stages of language development and make changes and improvement about present teaching. This paper, with EA as theoretical guidance, makes a tentative analysis of the common linguistic errors made by 80 freshmen in their writings in Shanxi Agricultural University. These writings are from English examination in the final term and 1126 errors are identified. Then, a classification of errors is made. They are classified into three types: surface errors, deep errors and Chinglish, among which the first two kinds are classified further. Among them, grammar errors are in the first place with the number of 391, accounting for 34.72% of the total. Lexical errors with the number of 350 are in the second place, accounting for 31.08%.Then are the Chinglish, discourse errors, substance errors and pragmatic errors, with the number of 220, 83, 76 and 6, accounting for 19.54%, 7.37%, 6.76% and 0.53% respectively.About surface errors, they are discussed from the aspect of language formation and are classified into substance errors, lexical errors and grammar errors. While about deep errors, they are discussed from the aspect of discourse and are classified into discourse errors and pragmatic errors. The results of the study show that (1) the most frequent errors are grammar errors, lexical errors and Chinglish;(2) grammar errors are the main difference between the high-mark compositions and the low-mark ones;(3) intralingual causes and interlingual causes are the main causes of these errors. Generally speaking, interlingual errors are more frequent than intralingual errors. Interlingual errors are caused mainly by mother tongue transfer, while an intralingual error is one which results from faulty or partial learning of the target language. And the sources of intralingual errors are usually discussed in the categories of overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restriction and incomplete rule application. According to the procedures of EA, causes of these errors are discussed and some suggestions to English teaching and learning are given.Compared with other studies, the paper tries to present and discusses errors in a comprehensive way, especially discusses discourse errors in detail in the hope of helping students of agricultural and forestry colleges in their English learning.