| The errors and mistakes committed by Chinese non-English majors in their English compositions have distinctive characteristics. One of the important types of research conducted in the field of Second Language Acquisition is to find the errors and mistakes of the learners and then classify and analyze them with the purpose of finding out the corresponding causes and providing some constructive suggestions and advice for teachers of English to conduct better college English teaching. The thesis is just of this type of positivistic research.The present research adopts "error analysis", a commonly-used method in the field of Second Language Acquisition to analyze the errors and mistakes in 30 selected English compositions written by second-year non-English majors. Then two typical methods of "feedback", i.e., "minimal marking" and "written comments" are employed to correct these compositions and observe the different feedbacks from the students. At the same time, two questionnaire surveys are conducted to get the information about the students' expected feedback from the teacher and the actual feedback they get from the teacher. Accordingly, the discrepancy between the kinds of feedback is analyzed. The research finds that the number of intralingual errors far surpasses that of interlingual errors, with "misuse or improper use of words" being the major type of error; the main causes of these errors are "overgeneralization", "incomplete rule application" and "ignorance of rule restriction"; the integrated use of the two methods of correction with different emphases based upon actual situations is a way out to better English composition teaching. The implication of the research for teachers of college English is that based on the actual errors committed in students' compositions, a flexible use of the two "feedback" methods, i.e., two different ways of correcting, should be employed to conduct English composition teaching.
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