Error Analysis Of College Students' English Writing

Based on error analysis theory, this thesis studies Chinese EFL learners'writings from the perspective of errors. It proceeds to summarize some features of students'errors to remind English teachers to be more aware of them. With abundant methodological enlightenment to share, the thesis calls for more effective and workable ways to correct learners'errors.In Chapter One—Literature Review, theories of contrastive analysis and error analysis are introduced briefly. Contrastive Analysis (CA) was a prevailing theoretical hypothesis formula in 1950s. It, in essence, focused on differences and similarity between the native/first language and target language, from which the process of transfer from learners'native language to target language could be detected clearly. Because of its association with an outdated model of language description and a discredited learning theory, CA lost its popularity. Next error analysis (EA) follows with its brief history of development. The heyday of error analysis was in 1970s. But impassable weaknesses in itself made it criticised in the early 1980s. In modern applied linguistics today, error analysis theory is very active particularly in second language acquisition (SLA). Five steps of error analysis are collection of a sample of learner language, identification of errors, description of errors, explanation of errors and evaluation of errors. In addition, pragmatic researches home and abroad on error analysis and error correction are illustrated.Chapter Two dwells on the methodology of the study. Samples chosen as the subjects are an English-major class in a vocational school. They had been assigned some writing tasks for a whole semester (from September 1, 2008 to January 31, 2009). Upon students'writings being corrected, the amount of errors on each type was counted to gather data for analysis.In Chapter Three, error analysis is done at three levels: lexical errors, grammatical errors and discourse errors. Following the five steps of error analysis, this thesis analyzes errors in a microanalysis way based on certain taxonomies and categories. After describing the difference between students'interlanguage and the target language, it probes into the errors'sources and evaluates how serious errors at different levels are. Then, it proceeds with the macro analysis from statistics of error taxonomies, numbers and percentages. It is not difficult to conclude some features during students'English learning process. Three aspects of students'errors attract our attention: morphological errors, subordination errors and run-on sentences. Next, limitations of the study are elaborated: 1) It is not easy to set an absolutely clear standard for"errors"and their relating categories. Therefore, it is inevitable to get some subjective factors involved. 2) Findings from the study may not be universally representative owing to the small size of corpora. 3) This study is more static that cannot depict a continuum of students'learning process.Chapter Four intensively dwells on obtained pedagogical implications, which aims at shedding much light on English teaching. Meanwhile, practical correction strategies from other English teachers are warmly welcomed by the author.Conclusion emphasizes significance of the research, with some suggestions for future study put forward as well.