Multilevel Error Analysis And Correction Of Chinese Higher Vocational EFL Learners' Writings

Based on the error analysis of students' writings, this dissertation attempts to find out some effective methods to deal with these errors and improve their writing performance. Beginning with multilevel error analysis of higher vocational EFL students' writings, it proceeds with some practical methods to treat errors, from which a series of pedagogical implications are obtained. With some presented teaching enlightenment to share, the dissertation also aims at more effective and workable corrective ways being explored.In Chapter One---literature review, error analysis is introduced at the very beginning and followed by its brief history of development. The study of error analysis rose at the end of 1960s and it welcomed its heyday in 1970s. However, owing to its insurmountable weak points, EA (error analysis) was criticized and lost the attention and enthusiasm to it in the early 1980s. But it doesn't mean EA retires from linguistic circle. Instead, it plays an assistant role in modern applied linguistics actively, especially in second language acquisition and methodology. Procedures of EA are also dwelt upon and five steps are involved: error collection, identification, description, explanation, and evaluation. The significance of error analysis lies in, to a greater extent, the research on error treatment. Principled EC (error correction) is applied EA. Quite a few pragmatic researches have been done and are being carried out home and abroad, with some of the main findings mentioned as well in this paper. Definitions of some key words are also covered in the latter part of chapter one such as slips, mistakes and errors, interlanguage, interlingual and intralingual errors.In Chapter Two, based on Carl James' theory of error taxonomy (James,2001) with slight adaptation, error analysis of Chinese higher vocational college students' writings is conducted, which is at the following three levels: substance errors, text errors and discourse errors. For errors at each level, subcategories are made with abundant examples abstracted from students' writing tasks. Following the five steps of error analysis, this paper identifies errors in students' writings based on certain taxonomies and categories, describes the deviation between students' idiosyncratic utterances and those in the target language, explains the errors' sources and evaluates how serious errors at different levels are.Based on what has been done for error analysis in Chapter Two, error correction forms the focus of chapter three which intends to find some effective methods to treat students' writing errors. Owing to the fact that less outcome is invited from the traditional way of teacher-authority correction, a new method called peer correction is introduced in English writing teaching. Some positive comments on this approach can be found in the literature of linguistics, but empirical data to prove its effectiveness is rarely seen. In view of this, contrastive experiment was conducted to testify the hypothesis that peer correction is a practical way to reduce students' writing errors. In this chapter, detailed illustrations of the experiment are elaborated ranging from subjects, materials, procedures, methods of data collection, data analysis to the limitations and compensatory measures. The findings of peer correction experiment show that it is especially efficient to work on such errors as misspellings, formal lexical errors and morphological errors. To the other error categories, it is not so efficacious; therefore exploration of other corrective feedbacks follows in the latter part of Chapter Three.Chapter Four intensively dwells on pedagogical implications resulting from the above writing error analysis and error correction exploration, which sheds much light on English teaching. It should be made clear that the effectiveness of correction is supported by the majority of linguistic researchers. Given that corrective feedbacks are preferred, there's spacious room to discuss how teachers and students make joint efforts to treat errors. Firstly, a rational attitude should be built up towards errors: they are not undesirable but indicative and helpful. Secondly, error correction is a process that should be undertaken jointly by both teachers and students. Thirdly, teachers should be orientated as organizers, listeners, facilitators, appreciators, guiders and supervisors in error correction. Fourthly, error correction cannot be merely understood as "correction". It should be a systematic and strategic process in which "feedback---correction---remediation" are involved. Fifthly, "spectator hypothesis" should be introduced into classroom, which means learners who commit errors are encouraged to be treated as spectators in error correction. Sixthly, students' preferences should be matched and finally students benefit differently from error correction due to their various levels of competence.In the part of Conclusion, significance of the error analysis and error correction is illustrated from theoretical and practical angles. Suggestions to future research are elaborated as well.