Error Analysis And Coping Strategies Of Senior High School Students1English Writing

Nobody can avoid committing errors.‘To err is human’ Alexander Pope, afamous poet in the18thcentury once said. It is unavoidable for the second languagelearners to commit errors in the process of learning, so it is not surprising that variousand endless language errors appear frequently in students’ compositions. In order tohelp the learners to make fewer mistakes in writing process, the study of these errorsare more and more necessary.With the development of linguistics and second language acquisition, manyresearchers believe that the learner’s language errors, which can help us understandthe process of learning, strengthen the understanding of foreign language and secondlanguage teaching and understanding, is an important part of language learning.Errors indicate learners’ inside system of interlanguage. But in practice, manyteachers lack of scientific understanding of language mistakes and made all sorts ofunreasonable treatment. They either ignore the error thoroughly or correct every error,which affects the enthusiasm of students’ language communication and make itdifficult to improve students’ language competence. However, it doesn’t mean thatwe will do nothing with it.This is an empirical study lasted for6months and the120subjects come fromtwo parallel classes of Grade2, in Foshan Experimental Senior High School. the twoparallel classes are designated as a control class where writing is taught in thetraditional method and an experimental class where teacher adopts errors analysismethod to deal with the errors committed. Both qualitative and quantitative analysisare carried out in the empirical study to make it more reliable and scientific. Firstly,the qualitative analysis which includes a questionnaire is made to get a insight intostudents understanding of errors. Quantitative analysis is employed to analyzestatistics from pre-test and pro-test. And then the results tested by SPSS16.0softwareprove that there is significant difference of writing ability between the control classand the experimental class, which means the errors analysis can improve students writing proficiency effectively.With the theories of contrastive analysis，error analysis and interlanguage as itstheoretical guidance, within the framework of James’ error classification, this thesisidentify and classify the errors committed in the testing samples first, followed by adiscussion of the factors leading to the errors. The results show that there are threetypes errors in the students’ compositions: substance errors, text errors and discourseerrors. Mother tongue interference and intralingual interference are the two mainfactors causing the errors. The interlingual errors plays a more prominent role thanthe intralingual errors., mainly by the negative transfer of mother tongue includingthinking mode transfer, cultural transfer and language transfer. While Intralingualerrors is caused by learners who are making incorrect assumptions about thelanguage, deviating from the rules of the structure. what’s more, teaching materialsand teaching methods have influence on students’ writing errors.This thesis believed that teachers must scientifically understand language error,deal with language error in appropriate ways to improve the English writing teachingand make the learner’s "interlanguage" approach to the target language.This thesis presents that teachers should treat students’ errors positively andtolerantly, but not ignores them. It is necessary for teachers to pay more attention tothe errors that interfere with communication and some effective ways on how tocorrect the errors are suggested. Besides the feedbacks from teachers, studentsshould participate in the correction activities, such as self-correction and peercorrection. Meanwhile, teachers should adopt the effective teaching methods andstimulate students’writing interest, pay attention to teach more elementary linguisticknowledge and infiltrate cross-culture teaching.Of course, it is not easy to classify errors and discover the possible resourcesowing to the complexity of language and language learning. Limited by time, spaceand the writer’s personal ability, it is unavoidable that some of the discussion oranalysis will fall into subjectivity. It is hoped the practical approach listed in thispaper will be of some help to some teachers in senior high schools, who arewondering how to deal with the students’ writing errors properly; and to some senior high school students, who are suffering from not knowing the proper way to improvetheir writing proficiency. It is hoped that the present preliminary study will lead tofurther studies in this field.