A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Errors On High School Students’ English Writing

Second language learning is regarded as a creative construction process, during which writing is regarded as an important language output. In this process, the appearance of error is inevitable. The author thinks that error is the reflection of language learners’inter-language development process. However, the current high school students’ English writing ability is not optimistic. Composition is full of mistakes, words, even the whole article correct sentences rarely. The lack of practical writing training and language problems repeated in the process of learning make students and teachers puzzled. Therefore, study on the errors in English writing has become an important concern of many language researchers and language teachers.The thesis is an empirical study based on the theory of the error analysis, a total of300high school students from Wei Cheng middle school in Xianyang were selected as the research objects, through the sample collection and analysis of students’English writing, combined with questionnaire and interviews of teachers, the author tries to find out the language mistakes in students’English writing and it’s causes, and to draw the corresponding teaching methods to improve students’ English writing. The innovation of this thesis lies in the corpus method that was introduced to the error study, with both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. On one hand, the million words corpus CLEC (China Learner English Corpus) has greatly expanded the sample capacity, on the other hand, the analysis results on the corpus and the sample analysis the author collected can confirm each other, makes the research results more objective and accurate.Studies have shown that the errors in high school students’English writing can be mainly divided into lexical errors, syntax errors and textual errors. Some of the errors seem to be authentic, incorrect use of words, sentences, or composition structure, but the writer finds out that the errors actually originated from students’ Chinese thinking mode. After careful analysis, the author also finds that many errors are not single error, be a result of interaction of many reasons. Including the negative transfer of mother tongue, intralingual transfer, learners’ language level, cognitive ability and learning habit. In the last chapter, the author combined with the current situation of English teaching and the feedback from the students writing in English, and puts forward some suggestions for the write teaching, I hope this thesis could be helpful for English teachers and students.