Error Analysis And Its Implications For Teaching English Writing In Chinese Senior High Schools

Writing is one of the four fundamental language skills for English learners toacquire, and much importance has been attached to this ability in today’s high schoolEnglish teaching. As a result, it has always been regarded as one of the priorities anddifficulties as to how to improve the efficiency of teaching writing and the quality ofstudents’ compositions.Unfortunately, the teaching of writing still remains Achilles’ heel among all thestudents’ abilities of using the target language, in spite of the fact that writing plays animportant role in communication and fully reflects a students’ capability of usingEnglish. Furthermore, the methods of teaching as well as ways of evaluation atpresent are not up to the requirements of teaching writing in the context of the newcurriculum.Errors are unavoidable in the process of English teaching and learning. However,a great number of students together with some teachers tend to take the errors forfaults in learning, thus hoping to erase or even avoid errors. Influenced by thistendency, many a student blindly tries to evade ‘risky’ attempts to use some better andmore pertinent expressions, which in return holds up the improvement of their writing.Worse still, compositions by different students resemble in contents and languagestyle, leaving on the readers an impression of elimination. On the other hand, thismisunderstanding of committing errors causes bad effects on the teaching of writing.Teachers focus too much on the errors in students’ writing and spend most of theirclass time correcting them, ignoring necessary guidance of strategies. Some of themeven rigidly force the students to learn by rote those so-called “sample versions” or“writing models”. All the above practices go against the nature of teaching and thespirit of the new curriculum. Anyway, the teaching of writing is above all the trainingand development of an ability.As one of the most important researching methods in SLA, Error Analysismainly focuses on a systematic study on the errors that second language learners make,tries to find out the sources of the errors, and gives explanations accordingly, thushelping improve teaching strategy and methods and eventually enhancing thestudents’ overall writing level.Based on Error Analysis and relavant theories, this thesis attempts to collect,analyze and explain the errors found in high school students’ compositions. Thensome strategies and methods will be put forward to provide guidance for improvingthe students’ writing and to promote efficient teaching of high school English writing.With the results of relative studies carried out already as a reference, the writer of this paper groups the errors in the students’ compositions into five categories, namely,substance errors, structural errors, errors of cohesion, Chinglish as well as pragmaticerrors. The causes of the errors are mainly inter-lingual transfer, intra-lingual transfer,induced errors, the negative effect of product-focused approach and some others. Thisresearch aims to find out the types and causes of the errors committed in thecompositions of high school students, and encourage teachers and students to renewtheir ideas of teaching and learning, make necessary adjustments accordingly, andimprove the efficiency of teaching English writing in high schools. In addition, somepractical methods for improving the evaluation of high school English writing arerecommended.To conclude, this study has been an exploration of possible approaches andstrategies for improving the current teaching of English writing in senior high schools.