A Study Of The Errors In Non-English Majors’ English Writing

A study about the scores of CET-4and CET-6in recent years shows that writing isstill a big problem for many students especially for non-English major college students.So how to effectively improve college students’ writing is becoming a more and moreurgent problem to be solved. Although many efforts are made to improve their writing,lots of errors are made by students.Error Analysis (EA) is the study and analysis of errors committed by foreignlanguage learners. According to the theory of Error Analysis, language learning is aprocess of making and correcting errors, and then improving learners’ language ability.For students, errors can reflect their deficiency in language learning; for teachers,difficulties in students’ language learning process can be predicted through ErrorAnalysis which can help them improve their teaching methods in time.Committing errors in language learning is inevitable for language learners which ismore common in college English writing. In this paper, three classes from students of2010of Xi’an International University (majoring in Accounting, Tourism Managementand Financial Management) are taken as the subjects. With the help of the ErrorAnalysis and the classification proposed by S.P.Corder, errors collected from thesubjects’ compositions are analyzed through which error sources are find and ways toerror correction are proposed.The whole paper can be divided into six chapters.Chapter One introduces the background of this study including Current Situation ofEnglish Writing, Importance of Writings, the Significance of Errors, the Significance ofthis paper and Organization of this paper.In Chapter Two, the involved theoretical knowledge is presented including AReview on Error, A Review on Error Analysis, the Procedures of Error Analysis and theDefinition of Interlanguage.In Chapter Three, the study design is illustrated.In Chapter Four, the results are obtained. According to James’ classification oferrors, the errors collected from samples are classified. Then, we can find that Grammarerrors take the largest part of errors students made, then followed by Lexical errors of24.6%. Finally, the main error sources are found: Interlingual Errors, Intralingual Errorsand Induced ErrorsIn Chapter Five, ways to Error Correction are proposed. Chapter Six concludes the whole paper.Finally, owing to the author’ limited theoretical knowledge and practical teachingexperience, the study is far from perfect and there is much room for improvement.While, it is also hoped that the study will be helpful to Chinese college students inEnglish writing.