A Study On Interlanguage In English Writings Of Non-English Majors From The Perspective Of Error Analysis

English Writing is always very important and difficult for Chinese learners ofEnglish. According to the New College English Curriculum Requirements issued byChinese Ministry of Education in2007, the lowest requirement on English writing forcollege students is the capability of accomplishing a writing task in describingpersonal experience, impressions, emotions and occurrence, and the capability ofwriting common practical writing. Accordingly the students are required to write anessay, which should be complete in structure, clear in theme, appropriate in diction andcoherent in meaning, and should be finished on a given topic of about120wordswithin30minutes, However, the status quo of college English writing teaching is notvery optimistic, especially for those non-English major students. Obviously, there aremany reasons for the problems which require us teachers and scholars to make anin-depth study of it.Since the1980s, a growing number of scholars, home and abroad, have turnedtheir attention to second language writing (Qin Xiaoqing, Wen qiufang,2007). Thefocus on second language writing is fourfold: writing process, writing production,writing environment, and writing teaching (Wang Lifei,2005). Error Analysis is animportant theory in SLA, which offers a basic theoretical framework for the study ofsecond language writing production. Error Analysis has developed for almost half acentury. The analysis of the errors of learner‘s language (Interlanguage), can reflect thelearner‘s English proficiency and development in language learning, errors and causes.The author conducted a tentative reading-writing teaching in a class majoring inaccounting in Guangxi University in order to encourage students to get rich contentsand to complete write tasks. The study was to see how well students could write andwhat problems they had. The study made a qualitative and quantitative analysis of thethree writing tasks by the class of34students centering on the features of errors from lexis, grammar to discourse from the perspective of Error Analysis. The researchquestions include:1. What are the main features in English writing of non-Englishmajors?2. What are the causes for those errors?3. What suggestions can be made forEnglish writing pedagogy? The research suggests that lexical and grammatical errorsrank first in language using errors, while errors of conjunction words and context logicare most frequent in cohesive error. Those errors come from the insufficient input oftarget language and first language transfer, as well as the limitation of teacher‘steaching. The results of the study offer us some pedagogical implications forpromoting English writing.Although the sample of thesis is relatively small, it can still help improvingEnglish writing teaching and providing data for theoretical research of Interlanguageof non-English majors. The limitation of the research lies mainly on the simpleresearch method and narrow scope. More attention will be paid to the depth and widthof second language research, for instance the usage of corpus and the combination oflearning process and teaching effort will be added in the future study.