A Study On English Writing Of Junior Middle School Students:a Perspective Of Error Analysis

Writing, as believed by many English educators, can directly reflect students’ written English communicative competence, so promoting students" writing ability is an essential step to cultivate students’English communicative competence. However, in today’s English teaching, there are many problems in junior middle school students’ writing, which directly affects the formation of students’English communicative ability. Therefore, errors frequently made by junior middle school students in their writing have become the hot issue many teachers want to solve. With the appearance of error analysis in1970s, which provides a new perspective for us to study the error itself, researchers’ focus has shifted to errors themselves from the comparison between native language and target language. Error analysis corrects people’s misunderstanding about errors and makes errors become the significant research symbols. Simply put, the errors made by students can reflect their acquisition of the second language they are learning, and based on students’errors, teachers can make a relevant plan to deal with these errors. Guided by the above-mentioned theory of error analysis, the author of this thesis aims to discuss errors frequently made by junior middle school in English writing and the reasons for these errors so as to put forward some specific and feasible teaching strategies to help improve teachers’English writing teaching and students’English writing.The present study, taking questionnaire, interview and students’writing of four exams (of them, the writing of the first three exams is pre-experiment, the last post-experiment which is conducted after adopting some teaching strategies) as research instruments, one hundred students in Class One and Two Grade Eight of Northwest Attached Middle School as research participants, aims to address the following questions:1) What kinds of errors appear more frequently in junior middle school students’writing?2) What are the reasons for the errors in their writing?3) What teaching strategies should the teachers adopt to deal with these errors? In view of the study, the author finds out that searching for the reasons of different kinds of errors is helpful to adopt specific and effective strategies, which makes the errors in post-experiment be reduced a lot than those in pre-experiment and students’average score of writing of post-experiment is much higher than that of pre-experiment.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the research background, the significance of the study and the objectives of the study. Chapter two summarizes the theory of error, analyses the research contributions and limitations of contrastive theory and interlanguage theory and then primarily describes error analysis. Chapter three states the research methodology, which includes research objectives, participants, instruments and procedures. Chapter four lists the results of the research and discusses the errors in students’writing from the classifications of error, the main reasons for the error to the relevant teaching strategies. Chapter five is the conclusion that summarizes the main findings and some limitations of this study, and moreover, gives some suggestions for the further study about this topic.