An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Error Analysis On The Improvement Of Students’ English Writing

In English writing teaching, the learners’ language output errors are not only common,but also inevitable.Therefore, the analysis on their errors is very essential and meaningful.There are two kinds of common methods to analyze errors or mistakes: one is ContrastiveAnalysis(CA), and the other is Error Analysis(EA). The two methods reflect different learningtheories and principles. A large number of empirical researches indicate that not all themistakes or errors can predicted by comparing the mother tongue (L1)and the targetlanguage(L2). Contrastive Analysis is not comprehensive. EA evolves on the basis of CA.EAis to find the cognitive strategies that foreign language learners take in the process oflanguage learning, to find out the cause of the errors and to sum up their common learningdifficulties so as to provide useful help for teaching. Errors are no longer terrible but a guideto know the internal mechanism of language learning process.The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of implementing the teachingmodel of EA by collective correction in the higher vocational English writing class onstudents’ English writing ability. It is discussed respectively from four aspects, namely theerror type, the cause of the error, the principle of error correction, error correction way so asto explore the EA’s function on the teaching of writing.This study adopts empirical research method. The subjects are selected randomly fromtwo parallel classes of freshmen2010in the Vocational and Technological College of DalianOcean University (N=80), who are designated randomly as one experimental class(C1) andone control class (C2). C1is taught writing by adopting collective error correction method toanalyze and guide the errors in students’ English composition while C2is taught writing in thetraditional teaching method. The experiment lasts for one semester.The study is non-equivalent group of quasi-experiment in which both qualitative andquantitative analysis are employed, which makes the study more scientific and reliable. Thequalitative analysis is conducted through the interview in order to gain a prelininary insightinto students’ recognition of errors in writing and error treatment. Quantitative analysis isconducted through tests. Data is also collected through pre-test and post-test.And then SPSS16.0software is employed to test the significant difference of English writing level from thepretest and the posttest between the two groups.The experimental results show that: thewriting performance of C1who is carried out EA writing mode, is sharply better than that ofC2who is adopted the traditional teaching model, which further indicates that EA caneffectively improve the writing proficiency of higher vocational students. The results ofinterviews show that students prefer the new model of Synthetic Treatment as EA strategy,which significantly enhances their writing enthusiasm and confidence. Finally,the thesis puts forward the pedagogical implications, the deficiencies of theexperiment and some relevant recommendations for English teaching, rethinks profoundly theissues in the experiment and makes prospect for the future vocational college Englishteaching.