Error Analysis On Students' English Writing In Senior High Schools And Pedagogical Suggestions

English is an important tool of communication. It is generally accepted that learning to write in a foreign language is the toughest job in language learning. English writing teaching has always been a difficult and weak point in the process of English teaching. Students are reluctant to write because they are afraid of making mistakes in their writings. Teachers neglect teaching of writing because of National Matriculation English Test and curriculum constraints. As a consequence, students'writing ability is not improved. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of improving the students'writing ability, the author intends to collect the errors and problems in students'writing, summarize the rules and features, analyze the cause and find out the methods of improving students'writing ability,The research is based on the theory of Error Analysis and carried out under the guidance of researches on the definition of errors, the classification of errors and the procedure of Error Analysis. The author collects sixty compositions of Grade Two students in a certain senior high school and categorizes and analyzes senior high school students'writing errors. The research aims to explore the students'common errors in English writing and their causes. The author finds out: in lexical level, errors usually occur among verbs, articles and nouns; and four main problems exist in syntax level; although the form and means are single , senior high students have the awareness of the cohesion in discourse level. In conclusion, there are many more Interlingual errors than Intralingual ones in senior high students'English writing and negative transfer is the main reason for students'errors. The great difference between Chinese and English is an obstacle to the development of students'writing ability.Following the analysis and discussion, teachers are able to find out the appropriate methods of teaching English writing. Meanwhile, six relevant teaching suggestions and measures are put forward :deal with the errors of negative transfer by contrastive analysis; develop effective writing teaching activities; strengthen language input by practicing reading and reciting; improve the students'language using competence; about the feedback of errors; arouse the teachers'awareness of pragmatic teaching. The author hopes this research can help the teachers guide English writing more effectively, reduce or avoid errors and improve the students'ability in English writing.