A Study Of Errors In Senior High School Students' English Compositions

The study on L2 writing errors has always been an important component of error studies. According to the collected data, most of the action researches carried out concerning writing errors by domestic researchers took intermediate or advanced learners, such as college non- or English majors as the subjects, while on the contrary, few took senior high school students as the subjects. Furthermore, the researches focused on senior high school students'writing errors are fewer. As for those several researches concerned about senior high school students'writing errors, most of them set the focus on some specific type of errors in the subjects'compositions. Nearly none of the domestic researches has ever applied the contrast method to study senior high school students'writing errors in terms of errors'categories and levels. So it is assumed that this dissertation will be a fresh approach to the study of errors in senior high school students'writings. It is also expected that the findings of this dissertation can be of help to improve the quality and effectiveness of English writing teaching in senior high schools.This dissertation is composed, centered on what types and levels the errors in senior high school students'writings pertain to, what characteristics they share, and what the causes of the errors are. It is constituted of three parts. They are:Chapter I: Literature review. In this chapter a review is made on the theories on error studies.Chapter II: Action research. In this research three methods were adopted, namely, text analysis, questionnaire and interview. To be specific, the questionnaire and interview are applied to senior high school students and senior high school English teachers respectively. Text analysis is used to analyze students'writings. As the main method, text analysis is applied, aiming to find out the types of errors and their ration in students'writings. The objective of questionnaire and interview, which serve as supplementary methods, is to find out the causes of the errors.Chapter III: Discussion. Through discussion on the statistics, the characteristics and causes of the errors in senior high school students'writings are fixed.