A Longitudinal Study Of The Errors In Chinese English Majors' Argumentative Essays

Writing, as one of the four basic skills in second and foreign language learning,is of greater value than ever before. Many researchers have written about itsimportance. However, at the same time, writing is also considered to be the lastacquired skill because it is the most difficult. The records of various kinds of testsall indicate that the language skills of Chinese students are not on the same level: thescores in reading comprehension and listening comprehension are higher than that inwriting. Therefore, to improve students' ability of writing is an urgent andimportant task.How can we test the students' writing ability? The large number of errors instudents' writing shows us the way out. By the study of errors, learners andteachers can both gain a lot of benefits. Recent years have seen a great number ofarticles published nationally and internationally to analyze errors in students'writings, but only a few of them are empirical studies, and few are longitudinal ones.The present study aims at conducting a longitudinal analysis of Chinesestudents' errors in writing within the framework of Error Analysis and Interlanguage.The subjects of this study are thirty English majors randomly selected from theForeign Language School of Nanchang University. And there are two instruments:the selected students' compositions from their final examinations and an errorcorrection exercise. All of the subjects are invited to write three articles with threedifferent titles at three different stages. Through the analysis of students' errors intheir writings and their performance in the error correction exercise, we can draw thefollowing four conclusions:1) With the passage of time and the endeavor of students, they could acquire agood knowledge of grammatical points and make fewer and fewergrammatical mistakes.2) Lexical errors are very complex. They take up a large part at the threestages. With the passage of time and the endeavor of students, they are not on the decrease, but on the rise, which deserves our attention.3) Spelling errors and punctuation errors, which are usually thought to be easyfor learners to correct, appear at the three stages. Moreover, their overalltendency is on the rise.4) Discourse errors have experienced a complicated development in the threeyears, being reduced largely in the second year but climbing up greatly inthe third year. Students don't have a solid knowledge of discoursecoherence.After finding out the different tendencies of each type of error, the authormakes a closer examination of the learners' errors and finds out what possibly liesbeneath those surface structures produced by the learners. The discussion isapproached from five aspects: 1) negative transfer of the mother tongue; 2)overgeneralization; 3) ignorance of rule restriction; 4) incomplete application ofrules; 5) communication strategy-based errors. Finally, the paper suggests someeffective measures taken to reduce errors and to guide English teaching.