Error Analysis On English Writing Of Chinese High School Students Due To Gender Difference

As it is known to all, writing in English, as an output, is a vital integrated skill.In order to produce something excellent, students should establish a solid foundation of the language and the competence to design the whole discourse. During the process of learning, errors are unavoidable to the students, which can be fully shown in writings. In recent years, more and more researchers start to do researches on the errors in writings. At the same time, a number of researchers concentrate on the weakness of the male students in their language learning. However, the research on English writing in high schools according to the gender differences is limited. This thesis tries to study the characteristics of the writing errors made by male and female high school students on the basis of Error Analysis, Contrastive Analysis and Interlanguage.This thesis collects the samples written by senior students from three kinds of high schools in Xi'an (Xi'an No 1 Railway High School, Xi'an No 38 High School, and Xi'an Taiyi Road High School) to do analyses. Altogether,309 writings are gathered and they are grouped in terms of the two genders. Then, the errors made by two genders are classified and counted, and also the reasons behind these are given.The results show that there are differences in the writings done by male and female students at the different levels of the errors. Generally speaking, on the some kinds of errors, male students do not perform as well as females. The reasons lying behind may be from different sources. From the linguistic point of view, interlingual and intralingual errors are the main kinds due to the transfer between different languages. From biological perspective, the major difference between the male and female's brains lies in the different structures of the brain. For female, the link between the left and right hemisphere is thicker than that of the male, which helps the female use both sides alternatively. This makes the females' communication much easier. From the perspective of the home and school education system, the expectation of the parents and teachers influences the trend of the students in choosing their future careers. This study makes the suggestions for both teachers and learners on the basis of the results from the study. It helps the male students in high schools to be aware of the differences from their female classmates. Furthermore, with the correct understanding and the assistance of their teachers, male students will make up with their weak fields in language study and enhance their capacity in using English.