Error Analysis Of English Composition Written By Undergraduates Of Non-English Majors

Error Analysis has gradually developed as an important subject and it is also one ofthe concerns of both linguistics and psychology. Making errors or mistakes is inevitable; itis one part of learning process, which is a very natural and common phenomenon.Language learning is a process of making constant errors, then correcting these errors, andfinally improves linguistic ability. Also, Error Analysis (EA) in language is supplementarymeans of foreign language teaching. Analyzing the errors made by students is helpful forteachers to improve their teaching and enhance students’ language capacity. Based on theEA theories, author of the thesis focus on analyzing the types and causes for errorsappeared in students’ writings, and put forward strategies for avoiding them. This thesis iscorpus-based research. Author collects200final test papers of non-English majors from auniversity of Inner Mongolian. Firstly, author finds out all the errors in their compositions;next classifies these errors; then analyzes causes for such errors with EA theories, in orderto seek solutions to each type of errors and to apply them to English teaching and learning.Through analysis towards the corpus, author finds that there are mainly three fields oferrors in English practical writings, namely, lexical field, grammatical field, and discoursefield. Lexical field involves errors concerning words, such as misspelling, misformation,misuse of articles and capitals. Grammatical errors, also we can call it syntax errors, whichinvolve misuse of tense, errors of subject-predicate collocation, preposition combinations,verb-verb collocations, etc. Discourse field contains misordering, misformation ofcomposite sentences, cohesion errors, and language expressing errors. Author studiedfigures collected form the corpus, listed various types of error according to theirproportions taken in the total errors. Statistic shows that the most frequent errors made bystudents are misspelling and misuse of tense, incorrect word formation, and misuse ofmodality/auxiliary come to the second.With many years college English teaching experiences, and on the basis of the studyconducted in this thesis, the author finds that there are mainly three causes account forstudents’ poor performance in English writing, namely, a few students with poor Englishbasic skills are afraid of writing English compositions, they hate English even do not want to learn it. Because of their lacking of vocabularies, they hold unserious attitude towardsEnglish words. They also have no clear ideas about function and usage ofarticles/word-buildings. Students who are not aware of principles of syntax, tense as wellas rules of subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, tense agreement, can not writecorrect English. In addition, most students greatly influenced by motherlanguage——Chinese. They are used to Chinese way of thinking, when they do theirEnglish writings; they finish Chinese compositions first, then translate them into Englishword by word, that is why Chinglish appears in most cases. Though some sentences aregrammatically correct, they do not fit the English habits, thus they are not correct Englishas well. In order to help students avoid such errors, author put forward some solutions:(1)improve students’ interest in learning English, dig out their potential ability;(2) shedimportance on English practical writing. Students should know rules and styles of Englishwritings, and recite more model compositions;(3) strengthen language foundation, focuson vocabulary teaching, in class, teacher ought to introduce students the synonyms,antonyms, of new words, ensure the repetition of words. Error analysis acts as one ofteaching means could improve both teachers’ teaching ability and students’ learningcapacity. With the scientific guidance of teachers, students will gradually be capable ofseeking their own errors and correcting them, in this way, their English can be improvedsomeday.