A Study On High School Students' Writing Errors And Error Correction Strategies

Writing is one of the basic language skills of English. The New Curriculum Standard and NMET set forth higher requirements on high school students'English writing and the traditional teaching approach on English writing no longer meets the needs of modern English teaching. In the teaching process of English writing, it is imperative to help students correct their writing errors and improve their writing proficiency, but how to solve this problem? Based on the theories of error analysis, cooperative instruction and academic motivation, this research focuses on the study of high school students'common writing errors and error correction strategies so as to find practical teaching strategies to improve students'writing proficiency.First, according to the theory of Error Analysis, the researcher collects the writing errors of 240 Senior One students in Dongkou No. 4 Middle School in nearly a month, analyzed and classified them and the causes of these errors are analyzed as well. Meanwhile, a survey of questionnaire is done on some students and an interview is conducted on some teachers on how writing errors are handled. The result shows that both the students and teachers are lack of clear awareness of error correction strategies.Then, according to the results of error analysis and the theories of cooperative instruction and academic motivation, the researcher puts forward five teaching strategies on error correction, which are teacher correction, class correction, peer correction, self-correction and face-to-face correction. In the following three months, an experiment on error correction strategies is done. The experiment shows that these five error correction strategies can enhance the cooperation between the teacher and students, arouse students'academic motivation and improve students'English writing proficiency.At the end of the research, some practical proposals on the teaching and learning of English writing of high school are presented and the limitations of this study is pointed out as well.