Error Analysis On Zhuang Junior Ethnic Students’ English Writing

With the process of globalization, English plays an increasinglyimportant role in international communication. However, due to the historicaland economic factors, the development of English learning and teaching inZhuang area has lagged behind. It exerts negative influence on local economicdevelopment as well as hinders the process of educational equality.In order to promote the development of English teaching and learning inZhuang area, the author conducted an empirical study on Zhuang students’English writing to provide some teaching implication. There are two researchquestions in this study.(1) What are the major classifications of errors in Zhuang students’English writing?(2) What are the possible sources underlying these errors?In order to answer these questions, The author adopted Error Analysis(EA) as the method to investigate45Zhuang students’ English writing. Acomposition and a journal were selected from each student as the data.Interview was also used as a supplementary means to explore the underlyingsources and the learning process.Errors are mainly found in the level of substance, text and discourse.Substance errors refer to misspelling and punctuation errors. The number oftext errors is the largest. They are further divided into lexical errors andgrammar errors, among which verb errors, preposition errors, article errors, misspelling and part of speech are the top five. The discourse errors arefound in omission of conjunctions, misuse of conjunctions andtopic-coherence. Because of transfer of unique principles of L1, there aresome errors exclusively found in Zhuang students. Another important findingis that there are some similarities between errors of Zhuang students and thatof Han ethnic students.The sources of Zhuang students’ errors are transfer, target languagecauses and induced causes. Besides, the author found that both L1and L2exert influence on English learning. Some errors are caused by L1transfer,while some by bilingual transfer.