A Study Of English Writing Errors In Senior Three Students

Scores of writing usually occupies fairly large percentage of the total score in NMET. However, to write an excellent English composition is by no means easy for many middle school students, since it requires integrated skills of various kinds, such as good understanding of the topic, appropriate expression of ideas and decent organizing capacity.This thesis is an empirical research on the errors of the collected compositions. Its theoretical bases are contrastive analysis, error analysis, and inter-language. The error classification is from Carl James’book entitled Errors in Language learning and use, namely, text errors, discourse errors on coherence, pragmatic errors and substance errors. The research questions are as follows:(1) What are the text errors committed by senior three students in their writings?(2) What are discourse errors committed by senior three students in their writings?(3) What are pragmatic errors committed by senior three students in their writings?(4) What are substance errors committed by senior three students in their writings?The corpus used in this research comprises a small collection of the English writing from Xinhua Middle School Senior three students’mid-term examination. The researcher collects119copies of test papers from two classes, to get to know the overall situations of writing errors. Nine copies of the samples are rejected for they are either the uncompleted ones, or the number of words is far below the requirement. Procedures of corpus analysis are as follows:Tag all the errors in the corpus, and make statistics to all types of errors by the computer software Antconc, and then compare frequency of each type of errors.The major findings from this study are as follows:For text errors (722/1609,44.8%, occupying the largest percentage), there are lexical errors (291/1609,18.1%, ranking the second among all sub-classifications of errors) and grammatical errors (430,26.7%, ranking the first among all sub-classifications of errors). Both interlingual interference and intralingual interference can cause such kind of errors.For discourse coherence errors (237/1609,14.7%, taking the second smallest percentage), there are errors of topic related coherence (119,7.4%) and relational coherence (118,7.3%). Causes of text errors are mainly interference of Chinese and English and intralingual interference.For pragmatic errors (221/1609,13.7%, taking the smallest percentage), there are errors as Chinglish (148,9.2%) and errors due to unclear expression of meanings (73,4.5%). Pragmatic errors can be caused by combined reasons, such as culture difference, induced factors, integrated English language levels and so on.For the substance errors (430/1609,26.7%, occupying the second largest percentage), there are spelling errors (61,3.8%), punctuation errors (195,12.1%), capitalization errors (145,9.0%) and format of paragraphs (29,1.8%). Surprisingly, the percentage of such kind of errors is not low. They are mainly caused by lacking knowledge of English common sense and other psychological factors of students.These results offer some implications for the teaching of English writing.Firstly, the text errors occupy the largest percentage, which shows many students’language skills are poor. So teachers should help students to strengthen their basic knowledge of English. And students should also pay attention to study and accumulation of such basic knowledge of English.Secondly, though number of discourse errors on coherence is not so large, such type of errors is very typical:Teachers should always encourage students to use various kinds of conjunctions to reach coherence.Thirdly, to reduce pragmatic errors of errors as Chinglish and errors due to unclear expression of meanings, teachers should not only pay attention to language teaching, they should also try to promote students’cultural awareness, improve their logical thinking mode and so on.Lastly, teachers should improve evaluation methods. In rating students’articles, teachers should encourage students’self-evaluation and peer evaluation. Only in so doing can students’ motivation and enthusiasm of study be enhanced, and therefore they become the true master of their study.Besides, the present study has its own limitations and calls for improvement in future related studies.Firstly, this study is only cross-sectional and the subjects are all at the same stage of English learning. So it cannot reflect development of English writing diachronically.Secondly, samples are collected in one exam, and the errors detected are only related to such an exam. They can vary if writing topic has changed.Finally, limited by the academic level of the researcher, classifications of errors may not be so precise. There may be some overlapping of error categories which can influence the result of the study.