| Writing, as one of the four basic skills in second and foreign language learning, is of greater value than before. However, writing is mostly difficult for Chinese teachers and students of English, so errors that appear in students'writings attract more and more attention of many researchers.Error Analysis reassesses the errors committed by learners in the second language. It takes errors as a natural fact that inevitably appears in the process of SLA.In this thesis, the author analyzes the errors in the CET-4 writings of non-English majors and constructs some teaching strategies based on the analysis, in order to help students in avoiding or removing these errors and get their writing ability improved.In the study of this thesis, 100 students are selected randomly among the non-English major sophomores in four different departments of Liao Ning Shihua University. The subjects take part in the simulated test of CET-4 once a month in Liao Ning Shihua University. They are asked to finish the real paper questions from 2004 to 2008, one set each time. The simulated tests have the important features of CET-4 writing tests, that is time-limitation, length demand, guided writing. And the compositions are marked based on the Principle of Scoring Writings in CET-4. Therefore, it is not very hard to make sure the validity and reliability of the research. 180 compositions from these subjects are collected, among which 120 are studied.After the identification, categorization and analysis of the errors detected in the samples, the author finds that students commit errors at all levels—lexical, grammar and discourse. Students of comparatively lower level commit more lexical and grammatical errors than those in Group 1 did. Discourse errors appear in almost all of the compositions. Most of the errors result from mother tongue interference and the frequency of the intralingual errors in this study is around 21%, a small portion of the total errors. But it attracts the author's attention because this kind of errors can significantly distinguish the good writings form the poor ones. The author also finds in this study that lexical errors account for a small proportion of all the errors and the number of sentence errors is quite low too, especially errors in subordination. This does not mean the students are very skillful in using the vocabulary or the language point, but that they try to avoid using them. This cause is named communication strategy.In order to gain a better knowledge and a deeper understanding of the current situation of the teaching and learning of writing, the author asks 40 students to answer the questionnaire. From the questionnaire, we can see that writing teaching has been ignored to some degree and the students have no idea of what to write or how to write it when confronted with a writing task. Though they have learnt a large number of vocabulary, the number of words they can use correctly and confidently is very small, that is to say a small portion of the vocabulary is active. Grammar teaching has long been weakened while a lot of students think it necessary to teach grammar in class. Few students recite any passages and the reading material available is very limited.Based on the research findings, the author puts forward some specific teaching strategies, taking Krashen's Input Hypothesis as the theoretical basis, as well as approaches to correcting compositions according to students'different levels of English proficiency. The author hopes that these methods are of great help to writing teaching in China. Lastly, the limitations of this study are pointed out and suggestions are given on the research in the future.
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