The Application Of Error Analysis In English Writing Teaching For English Majors In Vocational Colleges

Writing could synthetically reflect a human being’s cognitive ability, thinking abilityand language use ability. Thus, in recent years, as one of the most important criteria forjudging English communicative competence, English writing ability has long beenhighlighted by both English teachers and researchers. However, English writing is acomplex language output process, during which learners would inevitably commit a largenumber of errors. Then, how should English teachers deem and analyze these variouserrors to help students perform effective correction? So far, many studies have beenconducted to explore answers to this question，but most of them are mainly focused onmiddle school students or the non-English majors from undergraduate universities. Bycontrast, this thesis creatively takes the English majors from a vocational college as thesubjects of its study, summarizes the types of errors they often make and tentativelycarries out some new redress strategies.Before the experimental study, the author first makes a survey by deliveringquestionnaires to the160English majors from two vocational colleges. Having learnedtheir attitudes towards English writing, their writing habits and commonly-used writingmethods, the author finds out VC (vocational college) English majors’ main difficulties inEnglish writing as well as the problems existing in the present English writing teaching.Then, based on the result of the survey and Corder’s “Error Analysis” theory, this thesispresents an empirical study among80randomly chosen students, who come from twoparallel teaching classes majoring in Applied English in Hebei Vocational College ofForeign Languages. To begin with, the author tries to collect all the students’ papers fromtwo English writings (pretest) and judge them, which is immediately followed by anormative description of the quantity of errors as well as the error types and causal factorsfor errors. Then in order to compare the effect of English writing teaching, an empiricalexperiment is carried out by adopting the corresponding innovative redress and teachingstrategies in the experimental class while sticking to the traditional way of error correctionin the control class. Finally, after a whole semester’s tentative reform in English writingteaching in the experimental class, all the subjects are given two post writing tests, the results of which are compared to the data obtained from pre-test through IndependentSamples T Test and Paired Samples T Test to illustrate the changes in error quantity andquality among the control class and the experimental class as well as in the experimentalclass only. Thus, the implication of error analysis theory on English writing teaching invocational colleges is clarified and the effectiveness of the various applied redressstrategies is tested.The outcome of this empirical study reveals that the major barriers preventingstudents from enhancing their writing ability are their poor English foundation, Chinglishand their improper sentence cohesion, all of which should chiefly be attributed tointerlingual transfer and intralingual transfer. The author performs the strategy of“teaching students in accordance to their errors” in the experimental class and it has trulyincreased students’ enthusiasm and confidence in English writing. What’s more, by meansof self-reflection, peer coaching and teacher’s guidance, students have ultimatelyexperienced the whole process of error correction under the instruction of error analysistheory and benefited greatly from it. It is also proved that only when students play theirfull subjective role in study, can their English writing be rapidly improved.