Using Error Analysis To Improve College English Teaching

People may unavoidably make errors in the daily life. It is the same for foreign language learning, regardless of beginners, or foreign language teachers, or even native speakers. With the development of linguistics, psychology and the relevant disciplines, people have greatly changed the attitudes towards errors. In 1950's and 1960's, Contrast Analysis (CA) based on behaviorism and structuralism is generally adopted in analyzing learners' error. It is believed that learners make errors when differences exist in the structure of their mother tongue and the target language. Its significance lies in predicting the learner's errors: the teacher can confirm focal and difficult points in teaching.Later studies know that this kind of error in performance accounts for little, most of which are intralingual errors. As a result, error analysis appears in late 60's and early 70's, whose foundation is cognitive psychology. It regards errors as a sign of progress in foreign language learning. Error analysis, as a branch of applied linguistics, has been closely observed by researchers all the time. However, as a teaching and learning approach, is it correlative to the improvement in language competence? Nearly nobody has done any researches on this subject.The present writer once did some research into the Error Correction exercises in College English Test Band Six (CET6) and find a slight relevance between error analysis approach and the students' marks of CET6, which contributes to my further research in this project.From the viewpoint of the theoretical basis of Error Analysis(EA), this paper probes into the influence of EA, as a foreign language teaching and learning approach, on the achievement of the language learners. The 120 testees are undergraduates from Wuhan University of Science & Engineering (WUSE)-26 in Fashion Art Design Class 981 and 27 in Fashion Art Design Class 982, with the lower mean scores in NMET; 32 in Garment Engineering Class 001 and 35 in Machinery 004, with thehigher mean scores in NMET. I select, at random, one from the two of each grade, as the experimental group(Fashion Art Design 981 and Garment Engineering 001) employing the EA approach, and the other the control group(Fashion Art Design 982 and Machinery 004), employing the traditional approach.In the first English class, they are all asked to answer a questionnaire, including personal background, score of NMET, interest, purpose and method in language learning, etc., and then are arranged for different teaching according to the above arrangement. In the experimental group, the students are taught to identify, classify, explain and correct the errors, letting them form a kind of study habit gradually; while in the control group, the traditional teaching approach is employed in the classes. But at the end of each term, the four classes participate in the same exam at the same time. At the end of the study, all of them take part in CET4 until they finish the content described in the teaching syllabus. Finally, my own observation, questionnaire results, marks of the final-exams and CET4 are combined and analyzed to get the correlation and investigate its reasons, by means of SPSS, as well as the corresponding countermeasures. The conclusion is that the EA approach helps a bit in improving language competence, especially for learners of art majors. The reason is that their English level is not as good as those of ordinary majors in the arts or science due to the professional practices occupying too much time. I should point out that their English grammar and writing abilities can be improved a lot through the EA approach. They should concentrate on learning the language form, and do some more exercises of error correction in grammar and writing. Comparatively speaking, more successful foreign language learners show their strength in grammar, reading and writing, while their weakness in context comprehension and language performance. As a result, they ought to do some more synthetic exercises in forms of Error Correction in passages. In add...