An Analysis Of Common Errors In English Compositions Of Chinese Middle School Students

In the course of language learning, errors can be easily found in the output ofEnglish learners, especially those English beginners, for example, middle schoolstudents in China. For middle school students, errors are inevitable in their foreignlanguage learning,therefore it is of great significance to study error analysis, so as toimprove English teaching in middle schools. It is generally believed that there are twopopular methods in the analysis of errors: one is Contrastive Analysis and the otherError Analysis. These two methods reflect different learning theories and principles,and Error Analysis is thought to have developed on the basis of Contrastive Analysis.Contrastive Analysis, a comparative study of two languages, their similaritiesand differences, was thought by its proponents in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s to beuseful in predicting where second language learners would likely encounter problemsin learning a second language. According to Contrastive Analysis, the prime difficultyin learning a foreign language comes from mother tongue interference, and bycomparing the target language and the mother tongue, we could predict languagelearners' errors and learning difficulties, just as Lado, the main spokesman ofContrastive Analysis, put "Those elements that are similar to the (learner's) nativelanguage will be simple for him, and those areas that are different will bedifficult."(Lado, 1957:2). Language teachers should focus on these areas, design drillsthat are vital to the formation of new habits and try hard to prevent errors fromcoming up. If errors do crop up, they should be immediately corrected in case theyshould amount to wrong habits. However, later on, many empirical studies showed that Contrastive Analysis wasonly one-sided point of view because not all the errors could be predicted byidentifying the differences between the native language and the foreign language. Inorder to deal with this awkward situation, Wardhaugh (1970) revised ContrastiveAnalysis into two versions: a strong version and a weak version. The strong versionclaimed that contrastive analysis of the native language and the target language wouldpredict errors in foreign language learning, which does not always hold water. In theweak version, the researcher began with learner's errors and explained them bypointing to the similarities and differences between the two languages. Thisexplanatory power of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis was useful in a broaderapproach to detecting the sources of errors, namely Error Analysis.Error Analysis, based on Mentalist viewpoint, strongly argued that there was nosimple or prime cause of errors, and interference errors only accounted for a smallpart of errors. Error Analysis tended to collect and identify the errors made by thesecond or foreign language learners in order to classify and explain them. Errors wereno longer seen as undesirable, but as a guide to the inner workings of the languagelearning process.The author did an empirical study on the errors and found that a large majority ofthe errors made by middle school students arise from their mother tongue interference,and only a small portion of the errors belong to the intralingual errors. As to theinterlingual errors, they arrange from lexical errors to discourse and pragmatic errors.Intralingual errors show that the learners are actively involved in the process oflearning.In this paper, the author attempts to analyze those common errors that oftenoccur in the students' written output---compositions in the hope that this paper canprovide useful information for both English teachers and middle school students intheir English composition.