A Study Of EFL Learners' Writing Errors

This thesis studies the writing errors of EFL learners on the basis of authentic language materials and the theoretical framework of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theories. Errors are an integral part of language acquisition. In traditional language teaching, they are regarded as the linguistic phenomena deviant from the language rules and standard usages, reflecting learners' deficiency in language competence and acquisition device. However, with the development of linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology and other relevant subjects, people's attitude toward errors changed greatly. Before the 1960s, behaviorism played a predominant role in second language learning, and errors in foreign language learning were mainly predicted, explained and analyzed through contrastive analysis. Errors were considered to have resulted from the retainment of L1 habits or L1 interference. Contrastingly, error analysis and interlanguage theory, based on the framework of cognitive psychology, claimed that errors represent the hypothesis that language learners made about target language rules, and the analysis of learner errors can thus contribute to the exploration of psychological process involved in foreign language learning. These two paradigms have been widely employed in foreign language teaching since the 1970s.By means of the commonly used SLA research methods such as experiment and analysis, it has studied the writing errors of EFL learners both quantitatively and qualitatively. Pedagogical ideas on future instruction are thus proposed on this basis, with an aim to provide some guidance to the understanding of the errors committed by ESL learners and the methodology for the English teaching.The thesis is composed of six parts:The introductory chapter states the significance of this subject, clarifies the research purposes, defines the scope of the study and briefly outlines the structure of the thesis. In Chapter two, a comprehensive review of the previous researches on errors is given. Chapter three is about an experiment conducted in the form of a writing task for learners. Errors are sampled from their writings for investigation and analysis. In Chapter four, those errors are analyzed qualitatively and then quantitatively. Statistics are scrutinized from the perspective of language knowledge, linguistic category and error source, which assist in the recognition of error distribution rules and frequency of occurrence.On the basis of the research above, the findings can be summarized as follows:a. The highest occurrences are the ample number of errors falling into the syntactical category and the following problematic area of EFL learners is semantically-based errors.b. From the perspective of error source, interlingual errors play a more prominent role than intralingual errors which indicates that a large number of the errors learners produced are interference errors attributable to the mother tongue influence.Chapter five proposes some feasible pedagogical ideas, in an effort to ensure teachers' correct understanding of learner errors and their constant remedial adjustments of teaching materials and methods accordingly. The concluding remarks in the last chapter give a summary about the major findings and the significance of the present study and provide suggestions for future related research.