An Analysis Of Linguistic Errors In The Writing Of College Students And Its Implications

People may unavoidably make errors in daily life. It is the same case for language learning, regardless of beginners, foreign language teachers, or even native speakers. With the development of linguistics, psychology and the relevant disciplines, people have greatly changed their attitudes towards errors. In 1950's and 1960's, Contrastive Analysis (CA) based on behaviorism and structuralism was generally employed in analyzing learners' errors. It is believed that learners make errors when their mother tongue and target language are different. Learners' errors can be predicted during the learning process. However, later studies show that this kind of error only accounts for a little and most of the errors are intralingual ones. CA soon lost its popularity. As a result, Error Analysis(EA) appeared in late 1960's and early 1970's. It is based on cognitive psychology. Errors are regarded as a sign of progress in foreign language learning.As a branch of applied linguistics, EA plays an important role in second language teaching and learning. It helps researchers understand the process and strategies of second language learning, thus enriching theories of second language acquisition. It helps teachers realize the common characteristics shared by language learners, which can promote the progress in teaching. It also helps students gain some insights into the difficulties during the learning process, which can result in the improvement in their learning methods.The present study is based on EA and CA and the samples of it are forty-one students' exercise books from Laiyang Agricultural College. The students came to thiscollege in 2004. Their majors are Bioscience and Economy Management. There are altogether ninety-nine compositions selected from the students' homework. The linguistic errors in them are recognized and then put into five categories. Through statistical analysis of the results the number of each error type and the most frequently occurring errors are identified. Then causes of these errors are analyzed and discussed. The analysis shows that interlingual and intralingual transfer are the two main reasons. There are also some induced errors in the samples. T-test in SPSS program is used to see which types of errors have the highest correlation. Through the analysis, some remedial methods are proposed in order to shed some lights on English teaching.This thesis is divided into five chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion part. Introduction is about the significance and organization of the thesis. Chapter one is concerned about some relevant theories, including error definition, error classification, Contrastive Analysis, and Error Analysis. Chapter two talks about the methodology of the research, such as the subjects, instruments, procedures of the study, and error classification of the present study. They are classified into substance errors, lexical errors, grammar errors, discourse errors and Chinglish. Chapter three is the report of research results. There are altogether 2648 errors. The rank distribution of the errors is lexical errors(771), discourse errors(574), grammar errors(534), substance errors(406) and Chinglish(363), accounting for 29.1%, 21.7%, 20.2%, 15.3%, 13.7% respectively. The second finding is that all types of errors have correlation between each other except for the one between substance and discourse errors. The highest correlation is the one between lexical errors and Chinglish. Its r value is 0.912. The least correlation is the one between substance and grammatical errors, the value of which is 0.313. Chapter four is the analysis and discussion of the above results. It mainly deals with the reasons and causes of lexical errors and discourse errors. Theanalysis of the high correlation between lexical and discourse errors is also mentioned in this chapter. Chapter five is the implication of the findings in EFL and some remedial methods to reduce the errors in the process of learning languages. The last part is the conclusion of the thesis, which concerns the summary and limitations of the study.