Error Analysis Of Senior High School Students’ English Writings Based On Gender Differences

As an important language output, English can reflect the learners’ thinking, view, emotion and Englishproficiency to some extent. In the process of writing, committing errors is evitable and errors can just rightreveal the learners’ deviation from the above aspects. Therefore many researchers have focused on thelearners’ writing. Meanwhile the disadvantage of male students in language study has also attractedresearchers’ attention, and the researches on the differences between male and female students in Englishstudy gradually have increased. But the researches on the differences between male and females students inerror types presented in students’ English compositions are limited. This study, based on Error AnalysisTheory, tries to find the similarities and differences between male and female students on English writingerrors.This thesis collects the samples written by the students of Class Six and Class Eight in Grade One ofXinxiang No.3Senior High School. There are102compositions with51from male students and51fromfemale students. The author and two English teachers with rich teaching experience examine thecompositions and pick out the errors, then after discussion the author classify all the errors and group themaccording to the gender. At last, the author collects the total number and the number of male and femalestudents of each error type and analyzes the data scientifically.The results show that the students commit grammatical errors most, among which non-finite verberrors, predicate errors, part of speech errors and sentence structure errors all have high error frequencies.Substance errors and lexical errors also have a wide distribution with the spelling, punctuation, casesensitivity errors of substance errors and noun, pronoun, selection of inappropriate words errors of lexicalerrors accounting for high error frequencies. And the results also reveal that there are differences betweenmale and female students on different error types. As a whole, female students perform better than malestudents on discourse and lexical level. And on some levels such as spelling, subject-predicate, selection ofinappropriate words and noun level, female students also commit fewer errors than male students.This study gives suggestions for both English teachers and students based on the results of this study.It aims to help the teachers and students clearly realize the problems in English writing and the differences between male and female students in language study. Thus they can respond to that and adjust their oldteaching and studying ways to lesson the gap between male and female students in language study.