A Study Of The Developmental Features Of Errors In Writing Made By Senior High School Students

Linguists began to do research on errors language learners made since lastcentury. In China, a large amount of studies about English learners’ errors are alsowidely conducted to explore English language learners’ errors. However, the scope ofempirical studies was restricted within the categorization of errors and the reasonsattribute to the errors. Studies on interlanguage were mostly about fossilization.Research about the developmental features of learners’ errors is still not enough. Thecurrent research aims at finding out the development of errors students made and thereasons attributed to the developmental features of errors so that suggestions for Englishteaching and learning can be provided. At the same time, it provides materials for errorcorpus of English learners. Methods adopted in this research are sample analysis andinterview. The participants are students of a senior high school in Chengdu. First,294compositions of49students were collected, and errors in the writing samples werecalculated and categorized. It turned out that most of the errors are errors of omission,misformation, and addition.20students were interviewed. The developmental featuresof their errors and the reasons are given in this paper. On the basis of the above findings,implications on English teaching are provided. In the last part, limitation of this researchis given.