An Analysis On The Verb Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Wring

Of the four approaches to English learning, i.e. listening, speaking, reading andwriting, writing is the main output and is attached more and more importance in Englishteaching and learning in high school, which we can find from the increasing scores of thewriting part in the College Entrance Examination. Though English compositions written byhigh school students are not long, this reflects the learners’ difficulties in their learning andconfusions related to adopted strategies. Besides, writing is a means of English output, so itshould be valued by all the learners. Most teachers can easily find the errors in students’writing, especially verb errors, but there are still no effective solutions to correcting them.Therefore, it is quite necessary and urgent for us to find out efficient ways to help thelearners.Although some previous researches have been carried out, most of them were onlyconcerned with the possible errors made by students with only few concerning the errors inhigh school students’ compositions. If any, they were only about the possible errors ratherthan verb errors. So this research is very special, which focuses the analysis on verb errors.Based on the two theories including Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis, this researchintends to find out the common features belonging to the verb errors appearing in highschool students’ writing and work out the roots of the verb errors by analyzing andunderstanding those errors. In the study students’ writing verb errors are divided into threecategories according to the forming differences: one is called “memory errors”, which aremainly caused by the fact that students can’t clearly recall the English words or evenmisunderstand the English words; Another is called “diagnostic errors”, which come fromthe different grammar rules of the two languages English and Chinese; The third one is“forming errors”, which occur in the course of forming target language English. Theresearch will sort out and analyze the different types of verb errors and discover the causesof them. Meanwhile, the research illustrates that different attitudes should be taken towards different types of errors.The thesis investigates the errors made by360Senior Two students of a high school intheir final exam. Three hundred and sixty compositions of all the Senior Two students wereanalyzed, and1124errors were classified. The study of the errors has found the followingresults: Firstly, the verb errors are mainly diagnostic errors. Memory errors and formingerrors make up only a small part. Secondly, there are many reasons contributing to the verberrors. Interlingual errors are more than intralingual ones. Most errors result from theso-called “Chinese English”, which suggests that mother tongue is still confusing themterribly. Meanwhile, by means of asking students to finish the prepared questionnaires, thepossible aspects leading to the mistakes have been discovered. At the same time theteachers in my team have all been involved in the research on how to solve the problemwith the purpose of making students’ writing errors from few to none. Here the roots of theerrors have been studied and according to the study different errors require us teachers andstudents to correct them in quite different ways.