An Analysis Of Linguistic Errors In The Writing Of Art College Students

Error Analysis (EA), a branch of Applied Linguistics, has undoubtedly made great contributions to the study on second language learning. It not only throws some light on the process of second language learning, but also helps us gain some insights into the strategies learners employ in the learning process. A careful study of the writing errors reveals the common problems shared by the language learners, which is believed to be of great help to both language teachers and language learners.This thesis, with Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA), and Interlanguage (IL) as its theoretical basis, analyzes the compositions written by sophomores majoring in vocal music and instrumental music of Dalian Art College of Northeast University. There are two reasons why the writer chose art college students as the research subjects: firstly, compared with English majors and those who are majoring in other non-English major students, the art students (the subjects in this paper are vocal music students and instrumental music students) have much lower exam pressure and learning motivation. Since in order to get their master's degree, English majors have to pass TEM4 (Test for English Majors-Level 4), and other non-English majors have to pass CET4 (National College English Test-Level 4), while for those students who are majoring in arts, they only need to pass CET3 or CET2 to get their master's degree. So, students majoring in arts do have much lower motivation or inner drive to learn English. And according to James, motivation is probably the most frequently used catch-all term for explaining the success or failure of virtually any complex task. And countless studies and experiments have shown that motivation is a key to learning. Secondly, in the applied linguistics area, few researchers pay attention to the English learning of the art college students. Therefore, through this paper and the writer's research, writer hopes to provide some constructive suggestions to the foreign language teachers when they are dealing with the errors made by the art students and provide some implications to the foreign language researchers.In this paper, a classification of the errors is made first, followed by a discussion of the factors leading to the errors, with emphasis on the latter. The analysis shows that interlingual and intralingual errors are two major types, with the former playing a more prominent role than the latter. Following the analysis and discussion, relevant error correction methods and pedagogical suggestions are put forward.In order to increase the writing ability of the learners, we should start from analyzing the writing errors of learners, and help improve their language proficiency. Finally, it is hoped that the study will be helpful to language teachers in tackling students' writing errors.