Error Analysis And Study Of High School Students In English Writing

English writing reflects a comprehensive learning of English, and it is the most difficult to master among the four basic English skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing. It not only requires students of a solid foundation in English, but their ability to analyze the topic, to use the language flexibly, to organize the structure properly and to make comments on the issues. Therefore, to write a good English essay is no easy work.It is inevitable of students to make mistakes in their process of output. Although both teachers and students have tried to avoid mistakes in teaching, the current situation of English writing in Senior High School is urgent. Aimed to discover the factors that restrain students'improvement in writing, this essay makes a data analysis and categorizes on 84 students'English writings of a senior high school in Nanjing. Then the essay discusses the reasons committing such errors and the pedagogical enlightenment.According to James'classification on errors, the essay divides students'errors into four levels, they are the level of substance, the level of lexicon, the level of discourse and Chinglish. The study indicates that the misuse of grammar in the level of lexicon is the leading error for our senior high school students, besides, the misspelling of words and the lexical words are also at the top. In terms of sources, interlingual and intralingual errors are the major types with the latter playing a prominent role than the former.Following the analysis and discussion above, the essay puts forward some suggestions on teaching writing, including actively conducting reflective teaching, emphasizing the basic language skills, paying more attention to the cultural teaching, helping students cultivate a good writing habit, adopting different kinds of methods of error correction in the assessment class.Hopefully, the study will be help for both language learners and language teachers in senior high school.