An Analysis Of Errors In Senior Three Students’ English Writing

“To err is human.”Joseph Rios said. Nobody can live without errors. It isunavoidable for the Chinese students to commit errors in the process of learningEnglish. And writing error of English is an important output, from which we canknow student’s proficiency of English.The New English Curriculum Standards (Ministry of Education,2003) highlightsthe ability of writing and sets a higher objective for English writing, which requiresSenior Three high school students should reach the Band-8objective, which requiresthat the students be able to write paragraphs with advanced vocabulary and goodstructures in coherent discourses.Though Senior Three students have possessed the basic grammatical knowledgeof English and acquired a certain amount of vocabulary, they are very poor in writingand make lots of errors. Writing has become one of the most difficult tasks in Englishstudy in particular for male students. There are so many errors in students’ writing thatEnglish teachers often feel it difficult to correct them.In this study, there are totally164compositions collected from schools of in thearea of ShanWei city. Under the direction of Error Analysis theory and within theframework of James’ classification of errors (2001), the present research investigatesthe distributions of errors and gender difference in error making.In order to show a comprehensive picture of the distributions of errors, the authorwill investigate the distributions of errors in three dimensions: the distributions oferrors of main types, the distributions of errors of subtypes, and the specificdistribution in errors of main types. Chi-square tests are conducted to check if thereare significant differences in the distributions of errors. Independent samples t-testsare carried out to find out whether there are gender differences in errors. The majorfindings of the study are as follows:Firstly, the errors of main types and subtypes are not evenly distributed in theEnglish writing of the Senior Three students. Lexical errors rank the first in the errors of main types and syntax errors are the most striking errors among the errors ofsubtypes. Secondly, formal lexical errors are the most frequently occurred errors inlexical errors; syntax errors are the most outstanding errors in grammatical errors;misspellings are the most distinctive errors among errors of substance; errors ofconjunction rank the first in cohesive errors. Finally, there are statistically significantdifferences between male and female students in lexical and cohesive errors. Malestudents make more errors than female students in lexical and cohesive types. As forthe subtype errors, distinctive differences exist between the male and the femalestudents in lexical formal errors. Male students make more errors than female studentsin lexical formal type.