Vocational College Students' English Practical Writing Error Analysis And Its Effect On English Teaching

With the objective of developing students'linguistic competence and communication competence, English teaching in Vocational and Technical Colleges (VTC) gives priority to the practicality. However, there exist big problems about vocational-and-technical-college students, against a background of university expansion. They are afraid of writing. With serious content and linguistic problems, they can not express their ideas or required information clearly and accurately by English writing. Single sentence pattern, frequently appeared grammar mistakes, poor vocabulary and non-coherence symbolize their writings. When teaching English writing, a few teachers can seldom take a scientific attitude toward students'errors. They just give a grade for students'writing or mark mistakes in red ink without further error correction strategies, which may exert a negative effect on their interests in English writing.Based on Contractive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, the present study explored the common linguistic errors of vocational and technical college students'writings. With the help of EXCEL and SPSS 13.0, ninety-nine papers were first collected randomly from Henan Practical English Test for colleges A in June 2008, and then linguistic errors are recognized and put into five categorizes, including substance errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors, discourse errors and Chinese English. The statistical analysis of the results indicates that (1) The most frequently occurring errors were the lexical errors including misuse of part of speech, wrong choice of words and wrong collection, which account for 39.06%. Grammar errors and Chinese English were ranked 2nd and 3rd which respectively account for 20.82% and 18.47%. (2) Lexical errors have a high correlation with grammatical errors and Chinese English expressions. The values of r between lexical errors and grammar errors, lexical errors and Chinese English are 0.600 and 0.525. Also, with substantial examples from samples, this paper explored the reasons why lexical errors ranked the 1st from three aspects-- interlingual transfer, intralingual errors and inductive errors. The negative transfer of mother tongue exerts great influence on vocation-and-technical-college students'writing, and students'false recognition of the equivalence between English language and Chinese language in semantics and syntax as well as other external factors contributed to the high correlation between lexical errors and Chinese English. Finally, some remedial teaching strategies on VTC English writing teaching as well as limitation of present study were presented. The pedagogical implications are as the followings: first, English writing course should be timely arranged in College English class for non-English major students so that they could systematically acquire writing techniques and methods as to business letters and notes; secondly, in order to improve VTC students'competence, basic English courses on lexicon and grammar should be reinforced; thirdly, VTC students are encouraged to form a habit of extensive reading after class so that their reading competence will be strengthened; accordingly; fourthly, in College English teaching class, teachers should emphasize the accuracy and appropriateness of students'English writing by making comparative analysis between English and Chinese; finally, set up a reasonable learning objectives for VTCs and boost their confidence.