Error Analysis In The Middle School Students' English Writing And The Strategies

Error Analysis (EA) is the study of errors committed by second or foreign language learners. EA is the process of determining the incidence, nature, causes and consequences of unsuccessful language. By the late 1960s, EA had become the acceptable alternative to the Behaviorism-oriented Contrastive Analysis (CA) of the 1950s. Actually EA is no new topic; there are many theses about this topic. In spite of that, I still chose it as my research programme because these papers are mostly talking about errors made by college students and some by senior high school students. I always take it seriously that the study of the errors made by junior high school students is of great importance, for this learning period is very essential to the grasp of a foreign or second language. Therefore, my paper is a tentative study of students'errors in their compositions in junior high schools. Short as they might be, the compositions may show us what difficulties the students have at this stage when they output the target language in a written form, and what learning strategies they are employing when they have trouble acquiring the target language. This study attempts to classify these errors and discover some common characteristics, and thereby to enrich our understanding the nature of EA. Moreover, it is expected that the students'writing skill would be improved by effective ways of error correction. As to error correction, the research mainly deals with several such aspects as whether to correct errors, and how to do error correction in effective ways.As is known to all, no one can learn a foreign language without committing any errors in his learning process. The point is that there were constant arguments on the definition of error. Dulay (1982) argues that"errors are the flawed side of learner speech or writing"whereas Rod Ellis (1994) holds that an error can be defined as"a deviation from the norms of the target language".From my point of view, errors are significant at least in three respects: they can tell the teacher what needs to be taught; they can tell the researcher how learning proceeds; and they are the means whereby learners test their hypotheses about the L2.This study was carried out among students of Grate Nine in Jinan No.5 Middle School from September to December 2009. The subjects are students randomly chosen from Class 1 and Class 2. In the thesis,the subjects'errors are identified, described, classified, explained, evaluated and finally some effective ways of correcting errors are suggested. The errors committed by the students are categorized into two types: interlingual errors, and intralingual errors. These findings suggest that the students are mostly driven by the native language semantic schema at the outset of the writing. And later on when they learn more and more grammatical rules of English, the students are likely to overgeneralize the rules previously acquired in a new situation, which certainly results in errors.It is true that errors are natural and unavoidable in learning a foreign or second language. However, that does not imply we need to do nothing with it. So long as teachers are prudent to follow some effective techniques for error correction and try to stimulate the students'interest in learning English, and infiltrate culture teaching, correction will come to work. Sooner or later the students'writing level will be improved.