Verb Errors In High School Students’ English Compositions And Correction Strategies: A Case Study

Error Analysis，as a research area of Applied Linguistics, aims at analyzingvarious language errors made by students who are learning a second language orstudying a foreign language. Relevant research shows that through analysis ofstudents’ errors, we teachers can know more about our students’ level of a foreignlanguage and their learning strategies, and that by analyzing students’ errors weteachers may conscientiously explore our students’ learning process, cope with theirerrors effectively, and manage to improve the process and effects of teaching andlearning. But, as a matter of fact, many teachers tend to adopt inappropriate strategiesfor handling their students’ errors. That is why this study is quite necessary.With Error Analysis(EA) and Inter-language(IL) as its theoretical guide, thisthesis conducts a study of how teachers can cope with verb errors made by students sothat they may enhance their writing skills effectively, which is a worthy topic. Theauthor analyzes various verb errors in124English compositions written by62grade-one students at Huiwen High School in two different periods. Meanwhile, sheclassifies the verb errors into different types, inter-lingual and intra-lingual errorsbeing the two major types. Moreover, the author discusses various factors whichcaused those verb errors. Based on the analysis of the verb errors as well as the resultsof a questionnaire, the author adopts some strategies for coping with her students’verb errors. In order to test the strategies, the author carries out a three-monthteaching experiment. During the process she manages to help her students improvetheir ability to correct errors by implementing the strategies of increasing languageinput and getting errors corrected by peers. The results of the experiment show thatthese two strategies can stimulate the students’ enthusiasm for learning English anddramatically enhance the effects of teaching and learning.Through this case study, the author draws a conclusion: in order to render ErrorAnalysis effective, teachers must make scientific analysis of their students’ languageerrors and adopt proper strategies for coping with them and verify their effectivenessby means of an experiment; then they are supposed to improve the teaching processand raise their teaching efficiency by implementing the practical strategies.