| The paper is a longitudinal study of the students' errors in their compositions in senior Grade One. Short though it is, the composition may show us what difficulties the students have when they output the language in written form in this stage, and what learning strategies they are employing when they have trouble acquiring the target language. What the study attempts to do is to discover some common characteristics in the students' making errors in the compositions and tries to enrich our understanding of EA. Moreover, it is hoped that the students' writing skill can be improved by effective error correction. As to error correction, the paper deals with several aspects like whether to correct errors and how to do error correction in an effective way.The study was carried out in senior Grade One, No 1 Middle School of Longxi from September, 2003 to July, 2004. The subjects are from Class 1 and Class 2. Based on the model provided by Wang Lifei, the subjects' errors are identified, described, explained, evaluated and finally some effective ways of correcting are suggested. The errors committed by the sutents are categorized into three types which include the errors caused by the students' ignorance of English parts of speech, errors due to the transfer of the native language and errors attributable to L2 transfer or the transfer within English. These findings suggest that the students are mostly driven by the native language semantic schema at the outset of the writing. And later on when the students learn more and more rules of English, they are likely to overgeneralize the rules previously acquired in a new situation, which certainly results in errors.It is true that errors are unavoidable and natural in learning English. However, that does not imply we need do nothing with it. So long as teachers are prudent to follow some effective methods or techniques for error correction without embarrassing the students, correction will work.
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