On Error Analysis Of English Writing For Junior High School Students

Virtually every student makes errors in one way or another. Errors seem to be inevitable no matter what painstaking efforts we make in both learning and teaching aspects. Learners'errors, therefore, have long been a difficult problem for English teachers. English writing has become a most thorny issue and a matter of utmost concern to teachers of English both in China's middle schools and colleges. Problems arise and press us to look into such fields.It was not until the 1970s that Error Analysis (EA) became a recognized part of applied linguistics, a development that owed much to the work of Corder. EA constituted the first serious attempt to investigate learner language in order to discover how learners acquire an L2. The most significant contribution of EA lies in its success in elevating the status of learners' errors. Errors are no longer seen as `unwanted forms', but as evidence of how learners are setting about the task of learning. If teachers undertake a systematic analysis of errors,they could know how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and consequently what remains for him to learn. Besides, teachers could know the strategies and procedures that the learner uses in his learning process. From the standpoint of the learner, he may know better by the analysis and corrections of his errors, in what aspect he is weak and to what he should pay more attention in his learning process.With the development of the second language acquisition, people began to conduct a deeper study of the learners'errors. Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage have made great contributions to the study of errors. In this thesis different schools of research approaches to errors are reviewed.This thesis, with the three theories as its theoretical guidance, analyzes the errors made by Junior 2 students. In this thesis 988 errors and mistakes are collected from their English compositions.Following relevant error correction methods and pedagogical suggestions are put forward in order to be helpful for the effectiveness of language teaching and learning, and improve the writing ability of the learners.The present paper mainly consists of four parts. First of all, it sets forth the theoretical bases of different viewpoints and approaches to error studies, together with their merits and weakness reviewed and discussed. They are contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage. Secondly, there is a detailed description of the errors committed by Junior 2 students in their English writing. The errors are classified so as to make it possible to observe the distribution and proportion of different kinds of errors. Thirdly,it focuses on the causes of errors from different perspectives. It is found that the interlingual transfer is the chief cause of errors in Junior students'English writing. Some methods of error correction and teaching suggestions are followed. Lastly, it comes to a conclusion of the paper.