An Error Analysis On The English Writings Of Non-english Major Students

No one can avoid making errors in their daily life, so is in language learning. No matter who you are—a beginner, a foreign language teacher, or even a native speaker, you would make some errors. Writing, as one of the five basic skills, can not only express the learners'thoughts and ideas, but also reflect the learners'competence. In their writings, learners will produce errors in language, logic, etc. Learners show these errors in their writings, thus researchers can judge, analyze and explain them. Researchers and teachers of second languages soon come to realize that the errors learners made in constructing a new language system need to be analyzed carefully, for they possibly play a very important role in understanding how learners acquire a second language.In. the 1950s and 1960s, Contrastive Analysis based on behaviorism and structuralism was applied in analyzing learners'errors. It is believed that learners will make errors when there are differences between their mother tongue and the target language. Learners'errors can be predicted in the learning process. However, such kind of errors accounts for only a small portion of all the errors learners make. As a result, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Error Analysis which is based on cognitive psychology appeared. Errors are considered as a sign of a kind of progress in foreign language learning.As a branch of applied linguistics, error analysis plays an important role in second language learning and teaching. It can help researchers understand the learning process of learners and the strategies they apply, which will further push forward the theories of second language learning. It can also help teachers realize the common characteristics shared by language learners, and then they can give some group directions and promote teaching. Further more, it can help the learners gain some insights into the difficulties they have in their learning process, improve their methods of study and increase their academic achievements.This thesis is based on Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis, and takes the writings of 62 students from Business Administration and Civil Engineering in QingDao College, Ocean University of China as the subjects. The author collected all together 103 samples of writings. Errors learners made in these writings are classified into five main categories:substance errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors, discourse errors and Chinglish. Through the statistical analysis of these errors, the most frequent errors will be found, and the reasons for each kind of errors will be given and discussed. Finally, some suggestions for English teaching will be given.