Empirical Study On Errors In English Writings Of Postgraduates Majoring In English

The study of error plays an important role in exploring and discovering the rule of language acquisition in the study of second and foreign language. Therefore, the Error Analysis Theory is instructive for language learning and teaching. Based on the Error Analysis Theory, the present study is an empirical study on errors in English writings of postgraduates majoring in English according to the methods and procedures of analyzing errors. It is hoped that error patterns committed by advanced English majors in English writings are discovered.The present thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One is an overall description of the study. Research orientation and the significance of the present study are shown in this chapter. Chapter Two is literature review. The development of Error Analysis is traced and the major works and achievements about Error Analysis in China and abroad are introduced. And there are relatively few empirical studies about errors made by advanced English majors in their English writings. Chapter Three introduces the methods of analysis used in the thesis and the scope of the study. A corpus-based approach was adopted in the present study. Sixty compositions of four different styles were collected at random from the writing practice by Chinese-speaking postgraduates of English majors: narration (15), exposition (15), argumentation (15) and description (15). Two foreign teachers who are native English speakers and one Chinese teacher who is responsible for the English course were invited to correct these 60 essays. 380 errors in these essays were classified according to James' standard of classification: lexical errors, morphological errors, syntactic errors and discourse errors. The errors were classified by describing errors appearing in the samples. And the type-token ratio and frequency of errors were calculated by Excel statistic program. Chapter Four is a detailed report of an empirical study of writing errors conducted within the framework of Error Analysis. The procedure of the study was shown in this chapter, which includes hypothesis, error classification, error description and error analysis. The findings were obtained in the present study: (1) morphological errors, lexical errors and semantic errors which constitute small part of the total errors were not prominent; (2) syntactic errors were the most striking type of errors; (3) discourse errors, especially errors in cohesion and coherence of discourse, the arrangement of information and the whole text according to different types of writings, were prominent in advanced learners' writing; (4) errors made by the interference of Chinese were numerous. Chapter Five discusses the causes behind the results and the implication of the study. The present study also investigates the factors which cause the errors. Investigations show that error-making is related with including interlingual factors, intralingual factors and factors related to teaching strategies. The implications of the findings for English language learning and teaching in China are also discussed in the present study. Chapter Six is a conclusion of the thesis. Limitation of the present study and the implication of the study are stated in this chapter.It is hoped that the analysis of errors that appeared in the English writing of advanced English majors will help foreign language learners and teachers know the situation of English writing made by Chinese English learners and identify their problems or weak areas in English writings. It is also hoped that the findings and suggestions will give some insights to language learning for Chinese students.