Error Analysis And Error Correction Strategies For English Argumentative Writings Of English Majors In Independent College

Ability of the writing, one of the four basic skills of language, has been emphasized in the teaching of English skills. It is not only important language output skill, but also embodies English comprehensive ability of learners to use all kinds of knowledge, and then fully responses the learners’ language level. So,various problems in learning English writing are concerned and researched by many scholars and teachers.Making errors during the process of writing is a kind of inevitable phenomenon. The analysis and study of errors in students’ compositions will help scholars, teachers and students fully realize and understand students’ comprehensive ability to use language, and then effectively improve teaching and learning in the future.Students in the independent colleges, a major part of the domestic colleges and universities, make the mistakes in the process of writing that hinder the improvement of the students’ writing ability. Looking through the literature about writing errors, the author found that the studies on errors in the writings made by students in independent colleges were relatively less. Therefore, for English major students who tend to have weak proficiency in independent college, error analysis and research of the writing are very necessary and important in order to explore the effective strategies of writing teaching and learning and improve their writing abilities.Through the literature review on the writing errors abroad and at home, this study shows the current research status of the writing error analysis in detail. Based on Corder’s(1974) theory of error analysis and James’(2001) writing error classification, errors in the compositions made by English major students in the independent college were analyzed and classified, and empirical research on the English writing correction teaching has been carried out. Through analyzing and studying errors in English major writings in the independence college, teachers can master the students’ ability to use language; students fully understand their own writing ability. And using the three-step comprehensive error correction method could help students improve their ability of English writing.This study chose English major grade-first students in Northwest Normal University Zhixing college as the subjects. The experiments lasted for a semester. Sixty-eight students(sixty students’ materials involved in the data analysis) were involved in this study in order to understand the correlation between the errors types and the quality of students’ writing. One class is the experimental class, and the other is the controlled class. Before the trial, students in two classes were involved in the writing test and the resultsshowed that writing errors and composition scores of two classes have no obvious difference. The author used three-step comprehensive error correction method of English writing teaching in the experimental class, while the controlled class used the teacher’s teaching method of error correction. After the experiment, two classes were required to complete composition level test, checking whether the writing quality of the two classes exists obvious difference and three-step comprehensive error correction method is less effective or not.The results show that writing errors usually made by English majors in the independent college are divided into: substance errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors, discourse errors and Chinglish.Grammatical errors are the most relevant with the composition quality of the students; three-step comprehensive correction method in writing teaching is more effective.