Error Treatment Of High School Students' English Writing And The Relevant Teaching Strategies

In recent years, systematic studies of language errors committed by Chinese students in senior high schools have increasingly attracted the attention of English scholars and teachers in China. Error Analysis, a branch of Applied Linguistics, has undoubtedly made great contributions to the study on second language acquisition and teaching. Through it, we teachers can learn more things about the learners when they learn a foreign language. Based on this, we can try to improve our teaching and deal with errors more rationally.However, many teachers are not aware of the importance of proper error treatment. Some would correct all errors, and others would ignore all errors. Some people think that whenever a mistake or error is made, the teacher should correct it at once and then repeat the correct pattern or question for the benefit of the entire class. But others have different and even opposite opinions that mistakes or errors are natural and unavoidable for many reasons. If students do not get adequate opportunities to make mistakes, they will have little chance to work out better rules. No mistakes, no learning. To make errors serve teaching, we teachers must deal with errors scientifically.In fact, as the development of linguistics and SLA, more and more scholars suggest treating errors more rationally, thinking of errors as the natural part of language development. This is because these errors come from the target language itself, reflecting the process of language learning and learner's learning strategies.The study of learner's language errors began abroad. But at present more and more Chinese scholars and teachers also focus on the study of error treatment. Besides college students as subjects of study, many people, especially English teachers are also fixing their attention on senior high school students.So in the thesis, prior different research on errors and error corrections are reviewed. Obviously, Error Analysis has its own strengths and weaknesses, but anyway, careful study of errors reveals the common problems shared by language learners, which is believed to be of great help to both language teachers and language learners.This thesis, with the theory of Error Analysis as its theoretical guidance, analyzes written language errors committed by senior students of Grade Three in the author's hometown school. A careful survey is made of error treatment and senior students' attitudes towards errors, etc. Then efforts are made to find the effects of all the teaching patterns of error correction on the students' English writing.The author also makes a study of error treatment strategies in the instructional context of English teaching in senior high school. It attempts to give a comprehensive and systematic review of the theories and methods in exploring errors, and researches on error corrections as well. The paper supposes that teachers employ different error treatment strategies according to the types of error. What's more, we should take many factors into account, such as learners' preference and learners' linguistic competence and learning effect, etc.The author's teaching experiment results show that students are not active in self-correction and peer correction. But class correction and face-to-face correction are popular with the students. Surprisingly, the students like teacher correction best, thinking that the teachers have the duty and ability to correct all the errors in their writing. On the other hand, it reflects that they are too lazy and dependable to check and correct their own compositions.On the basis of the experiment, the author puts forward the attitudes to errors and the ways to deal with errors. We know errors are unavoidable in language learning, so we must correct some errors sometimes. But it is better for us teachers not to correct all the errors by ourselves. That is, teachers can not correct everything. Students should be given chances to join in the correction activity. So when treating errors we can adopt many ways, such as self-correction, peer correction, teacher correction, class correction and face-to-face correction.As English teachers, we should have a good understanding of error analysis theory and of the reasons why language learners make errors. Then we can put forward corresponding methods of dealing with errors. To achieve this, we must keep the following five things in mind, that is, whether, when, how to correct which errors and who is responsible for error correction. Besides, we should increase the amount of language input and output. Our aim is to improve their English level including writing ability.