The Applied Error Analysis In College English

According to Brown(1987:169-171),human learning is a process involving making errors. In English language learning process, it has been a never-ending phenomenon for the learners to make errors and therefore a thorny problem for the teachers to solve. There were many arguments on the definition of errors. Dulay and Burt (1982:139) argue that "errors are the flawed side of learners' speech or writing". According to Rod Ellis (1985, 1987), an error can be defined as a deviation from the norms of the target language. Error Analysis(EA),which aroused in 1960s and generally recognized as a branch of applied linguistics in 1970s,pays much attention to errors—-not only the various definitions, but also the features and rules the errors reflect. It is the process of determining the linguistic features and systematic rules of errors, which plays an important part in helping teachers and researchers sum up the regularities of errors and contribute a great deal to improving teaching.This M.A thesis attempts to probe into the linguistic features and properties of learners' errors on the framework of Error Analysis theory, and further to reveal the rules and suggest some approaches to the treatment of errors in English language teaching. This thesis is divided into six chapters: Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to errors, Error Analysis and the structure of the M.A thesis. Chapter 2 is a review of Error Analysis, which includes researches on EA, theoretical bases of EA, the aims of EA, the contribution of EA and so on. It attempts to pave the way for the case study in Chapter 3; Chapter 3 is devoted to a tentative study on the errors produced by Chinese non-English major college students. The purpose of this experiment is to show the possible portion of interlingual and intralingual errors made by college students learning English as a foreign language and give some hints of what causes errors in the learning process. Chapter 4 deals with the possible causes of interlanguage errors and intralingual errors, which are the thorny issues to cope with. Chapter 5 presents some pedagogical implications of error studies by considering three aspects of English language teaching: error correction, the role of teachers in the English language classroom and also the design of teaching materials and tests. Chapter 7 draws a conclusion.