An Analysis Of The Linguistic Errors In The Writing Of Normal College English Learners

An Analysis of the Linguistic Errors in the Writing of Normal College StudentsAs a branch of applied linguistics, Error Analysis (EA) plays an important role in second language teaching and learning. It helps researchers understand the process and strategies of second language learning, thus enriching theories of second language acquisition (SLA). It helps teachers realize the common characteristics shared by language learners, which can promote the progress in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching. It also helps students gain some insights into the difficulties during the learning process, which can result in the improvement in their learning methods.The present study is based on EA and Contrastive Analysis (CA). The collected samples are 145 compositions of students in 2008 A-level Pilot Class 6,7, and 8 from Baotou Teachers'College. The linguistic errors in the samples are recognized and then put into two categories:substance errors, text errors. The level of Chinglish will be added in the present study. Frequency and Descriptive Statistics from Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software v17.0 will be adopted in the study to make the data analysis more vivid and concise, which indicate the general tendency of their commitment of errors. Through statistical analysis of the results, the number of each error type and the most frequently occurring errors are identified. Then causes of these errors are analyzed and discussed. The results show that intralingual transfer, interlingual transfer, communication transfer, and induction are the main reasons, with intralingual transfer playing a more prominent role than the rest. At last, some implications are proposed in order to shed some lights on English teaching.This thesis is divided into seven chapters. Chapter One is about the significance and organization of the thesis. In Chapter Two, literature related to the study is reviewed, including Interlanguage (IL) theory, and two SLA approaches applied in the present study:Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA).Chapter Three talks about the research design. Firstly, it provides the description and classification of errors guided by James'model of categorizing errors. The linguistic errors normal college English learners committed are classified into substance errors, text errors and Chinglish. Besides, it introduces objectives, research questions, research methods in which the experimental study is carried out. The instruments and the procedures of the study are introduced as well.In Chapter Four, the results are reported with the illustration of specific examples of each type. Through statistical analysis of the sample data, the total number of errors is 1569. The rank distribution of the errors is text errors (1148) which outnumber the other two types, substance errors (377) and Chinglish (44), accounting for 73%,24%and 3 %of the total respectively. The most frequentl are text errors especially grammar errors.Based on data collection, Chapter Five will be devoted to the elaborate data analysis and reasonable discussions of the possible causes leading to errors in students' writing.In Chapter Six, the researcher will prose some pedagogical implications given to improve the EFL teaching of writing as well the students' linguistic competence ultimately in light of problems found in this study.The last part is the conclusion of the thesis, which concerns the summary, limitations and further research of the study.