A Study Of Multi-level Error Analysis And Error Correction Methods In English Writing

According to Bacon，"Reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exactman (1625)." It is observed by Raimes that Writing is the communication between writers andreaders .For language learners, writing is very important for measuring their linguistic competence. Itrequires a comprehensive knowledge of English: grammar, vocabulary, and a hard process of Englishthinking mode (Raimes,1983). English writing ability is one of the goals of EnglishSyllabus .However, writing performance of higher vocational college students, especially 3+2vocational and technical college students, is far from satisfactory. The reason is that our studentsprefer to spend more time acquiring the input of knowledge rather than pay attention to the output oflanguage. As a result, for students, after consuming so much time in writing, they may feel frustratedwith little progress, so they perform poorly in writing and writing tests. One of the most importantreasons is that errors made in their English writing hinder their improvement of writing ability(Raimes, 1983). Therefore, based on the theories of Error Analysis and Contrastive Analysis and byusing the results of error studies on the learners at abroad and home, the author studies, classifies theerrors committed by the 3+2 English majors of Foreign Language Normal College of TaiyuanUniversity to find out the characteristics and types of errors in the students’writing .After that, someefforts are made to find the causes of errors. The author aims to find out a comprehensive andeffective way of teaching English and give some guidance for the students in their writing. And it ishoped that it can provide some help for English teachers dealing with all errors committed by lowergrade students in a 3+2 vocational and technical college.The first part introduces briefly the background, purposes of this study and the outline of thewhole paper. Then, some important definitions and some theories of error analysis are provided inliterature review, on which the research will be based. The following chapter describes the wholeresearch process based on the theory of error analysis and illustrates the details about themethodology of the research. The research focuses on three problems: 1) What types of errors arecommitted by 3+2 lower grade English majors in English writing? 2) What are the highest frequentlyerrors made by 3+2 lower grade English majors in English writing? 3) To reduce students’errors inEnglish writing, is the Integrated Error Correction an efficient error correction method? In order tofind the answers to research questions, a quantitative research is conducted in this thesis. One hundred second-year English majors from two classes in Foreign Language Normal College of TaiyuanUniversity were selected as subjects. All the subjects were asked to write a composition in the finalexamination In June, 2011. A self-designed questionnaire was conducted in this study to gain a deeperunderstanding of the correlation between the four types of errors and students’writing quality. Acontrastive experiment was conducted in the two parallel classes. In experimental class, the IntegratedError correction was adopted, while traditional error correction is used in controlled class. Thisexperiment lasted for one term. At the end of the term, another composition was required to finish.The data of errors was collected and the writing errors committed in both classes were classified,compared and summarized. The result showed that errors on the level of discourse occurred mostfrequently and directly affected the quality of these students’English writing.Findings show that errors for 3+2 vocational and technical college students, English writingmainly focus on the following four levels: substance errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors anddiscourse errors. Among the above four levels of errors, errors on the level of discourse occur mostfrequently. Also, Interlingual and intralingual errors are two major sources of errors committed bystudents.,and interlingual errors are more prominent than intralingual errors for students. It is thenumber of discourse errors in their writings that most significantly distinguish the good writings fromthe poor ones. Lastly, it is concluded that Integrated Error Correction is a more effective method thanother correction methods.