A Study On The Effectiveness Of The Error Correction Strategies In Improving Chinese Senior High School Students’ English Writing

English writing, one of the most important skills in language learning, has been and always is a headache to students and teachers in senior high schools. Both of them are trying every means to improve this skill, but the effect is not very obvious. However, the National English Curriculum Standards places high demands on accuracy, fluency, coherence and organization, which are failed to meet for most students. Thus, to improve the teaching of English writing in senior high schools is very urgent.Errors are inevitable in students’writing. However, if students make fewer errors, the quality of their production will be better. Thus, to find a way to prevent those errors is worth studying. In order to improve the effect of the teaching of English writing, the researcher of this study turns the research perspective to the error correction strategies and puts forward a framework of error correction. In this study, the error analysis is used as the methodology in dealing with the errors in students’English writing and the framework of error correction proposed by the researcher of this study is used as the means for teaching intervention. In the empirical study, the subjects are from Grade 2 in Tongliang Senior High School, Chongqing,50 from the experimental class and 50 from the control class. The students from these two classes are almost at the same level in English proficiency before the pre-test. A four-month teaching intervention is carried out in the experimental class, where students are guided by the English teacher to employ the framework for error correction; while the students in the control class continue to take the previous revising procedure and technique. In the pre-test and post-test, all the participants are asked to write English compositions with the same requirements. After the writing tasks, all the valid compositions are read, corrected and scored by the same English teacher. In order to testify the hypothesis whether the framework of error correction can effectively prevent errors in senior high school students’English composition, errors are counted and collected from the pre-test and post-test. Then, the SPSS 13.0 is used to process these data in order to examine the research hypothesis.The results of the experiment show that the proposed framework of error correction can effectively prevent errors in senior high school students’English composition. After the practice of adoption of the three strategies (the self-correction strategy, peer-correction strategy and teacher correction strategy) in the proposed framework, the errors in students’ English compositions from the experimental class are considerably reduced.The contribution of this study lies in two aspects. First, this paper proposes a framework of error correction for the research, which is the characterized by its systematicity and unity. In this framework of error correction, the preparation work before the correction process and the reviewing work after the correction process are also emphasized besides the correction stage, and each stage has the respective aim and theoretical bases. Second, for the teaching of English writing, this study provides a helpful way in improving the effectiveness of English writing teaching and in alleviating teachers’ burden in correcting students’compositions, and more importantly, in the process of combining three correction strategies together, students get another chance to activate their linguistic competence.