An Analysis Of Errors In Senior Students' Writing

In The High School New English Curriculum Standard (2003), the objective of English teaching in high school is to develop students'relatively high level of language competence. According to it, after finishing three years'English course, what they write in English should have clear meaning and have no major language mistakes.But errors are inevitable. In this thesis students'writings have been collected and their errors have been analyzed to find the causes. Then we could find the proper teaching strategies to improve their writings.In this study, the aim is to find out what errors our students often make and what causes these errors; therefore, we can take the right strategies to improve students writing. According to the study, we can learn the factors affecting the writing level, then some necessary methods can be used in daily writing practice. After the research we answered these questions:1. What errors may occur in writings of the high school students? What are common error types?2. What are the likely causes of making these errors?3. How can we correct or lessen these errors in our daily teaching?In order to answer these questions, Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Transfer Analysis has been used. Of them Error Analysis is specially made use of. During the study, we used questionnaires, interviews. One of the conclusions of this study is to give advice on teaching in class writing.The study shows that there are two types of errors:Lexical errors and Grammar errors. We have three findings in this dissertation. Finding 1 Too many errors appeared in students'writings. Some of the writings can't make the readers understand what the author wanted to say, let alone, fluently. Finding 2 First language influence appears to be strongest in complex word and for word translations of phrases. Finding 3 Ignorance of the target language rule exists.The causes of making these errors are intralingual errors, blending, superfluous "be", overinclusion, false analogy, ignorance of English language rules, etc.