A Study On Teaching English Writing In Vocational College Based On Theory Of Error Analysis

Writing is one of the basic abilities in foreign language teaching and learning. Itis a reflection of both the students’ receptive capacity and productive capacity. Writingerrors are one of the major production errors that most language teachers mayencounter in the language teaching practice. Moreover, those errors pose a hard nut tocrack for the students to learn the language.In the context of English teaching in higher vocational colleges, the teaching ofwriting has always been difficult. Writing errors have become obstacles for studentslearning English in Higher Vocational Colleges.This paper firstly reviews the foreign and domestic scholars’ relative studies ontheory of error analysis and introduces the theoretical foundation; to illustrate somebasic theories concerned about error and theory of error analysis.The research questions in this study are as follows.(1) What are the language errors that can be found in Vocaitonal Collegestudents’ English compositions?(2) Do the teaching strategies in English teaching have the obvious effects onstudents’ improvement in their English writing skills and less mistakes made in theircompositions?This research mainly focuses on the analysis of their distribution and frequencyof errors in Chinese students’ writing and aims to find the solutions to improve theirwriting abilities by analyzing the errors in181compositions by71students of BozhouHigher Vocational College School. Questionnaire investigation, interview andcomparative experiment are used as research methods. The errors are classified andpresented at levels of spelling, lexis, syntax, discourse and cultural perspective.The quantitative analysis shows that the lexical and syntactic errors account forthe most part of the percentage, the lexical34.1%and the syntactic37.1%.The qualitative analysis shows that the way of thinking between English andChinese leads to most errors in students’ writing.On the basis of the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the following conclusions are drawn:1. Vocabulary and grammar are two of the most important elements of studentsto improve the writing ability. They attach too much importance to the literal meaningof words and phrases. They master the meaning of words and phrases only throughtranslation, and not in the context. As for grammar, the students just rote learninggrammar rules, and don’t put them into practical use, resulting in syntax errors.2. Differences between Chinese and English linguistic thinking is the mainreason leading to the students’ writing errors.