Error Analysis On Non-english Majors’ Writing In Northwest A&F University

In the process of English learning, every language leaner can not avoid committingvarious kinds of language errors. There also exist many difficulties and errors in languagelearners’ writing, which is generally considered as the most difficult part in the languagelearning by the students. In the first place, although different kinds of research has beenconducted concerning the errors in foreign language learners’ writing, research of the errorscommitting by the students in the kinds of Agriculture and Forest University are stillinsufficient, especially in domestic studies. In the second place, many researchers who studyon the errors always just only excluding their study to find the categories of the errors thatstudents commit, these researchers just analyze each kind of errors alone without consideringwhether there are some correlations among the kinds of errors. This study employs ErrorAnalysis(EA),Contrastive Analysis(CA) as its theoretical basis, and with the employment ofthe SPSS software as its experimental tool, analyze some common linguistic language errorsin the writing of the students in agricultural and forestry universities in China, and then findsout the relation among each kinds of errors, then offers some suggestion to teaching of thecollege English writing.This thesis analyzes the first year non-English major students’ English writingcompositions of final exam in Northwest A&F University. The author selects242studentsfrom four different non-English majors, namely as Wine and wine project, AgriculturalEconomics and Management, planting protection, Irrigation and Drainage Engineering inNorthwest A&F University, the author classifies all the errors committed by the242studentsin their English final examination, then tries to analyze the data: firstly, to describe the errorsin detail; secondly, to classify the errors into different error types, to find out each error type’sproportion, and whether and how there exist some correlations among the kinds of errors,finally, to discuss and analyze the kinds of factors that result in the language errors.The analysis in this thesis shows that (1) grammar errors, substance errors and lexiconerrors are the three types of errors that committed by the students most frequently.(2) Thewriting proficiency of the students mostly due to their grammar proficiency, therefore, theEnglish teachers in university should still attach much importance to enhance their students’grammar proficiency during their teaching process.(3) as for the error sources, interlingualerrors and intralingual errors are two major kinds errors that students commit，and the former plays a more important role than the latter one.(4) From the correlation experiment result, weget the positive correlation between three groups, namely as substance error and grammarerror, lexical error and discourse error, and chinglish and discourse error.According to the research findings and taking the questionnaire into consideration, theauthor tries to offer some teaching implication into teaching English writing, for instance,how to improve grammar teaching, lexical teaching, discourse teaching and writing teaching,etc. The author hopes these ways can be a teaching reference for the teachers who want tohelp their student to improve their writing proficiency in an effective way.