Analysis Of Errors In English Writings Of Third Year Students Of Senior High School

Based on the theories and in reference to the methods of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Language Transfer, the present study collected and analyzed 205 compositions written in a final exam by the third year students of senior from Laiyang No. 1 Middle School for the purpose of finding the errors and their types and of analyzing their possible causes so as to provide information for both teachers and students in senior high school to do better in their writing teaching and learning. The error classification is from Carl James’ book entitled Errors in Language Learning and Use, namely, text errors, discourse errors on coherence, and substance errors. Errors in the students’ writings are divided into three main classes with fifteen subclasses, and the software of Antconc is used to deal with the errors and statistical data.The research questions of this paper are as follows:(1) What sorts of errors do the third year students of senior high school students make in their English writing?(2) What are the causes of these errors?(3) What enlightenment can error analysis provide to English writing teaching?The major findings are:In the 205 compositions, there are 1682 errors altogether. There are 964 text errors, accounting for 57.4%(ranking the first). Text errors include lexical errors 669(39.8%) and grammatical errors 295(17.6%). These errors are caused by both positive transfer and negative transfer.There are 442 discourse coherence errors, accounting for 26.3%(ranking the second). Discourse coherence errors include the topical coherence errors 112(6.7%), the relational coherent errors 53(3.2%) and pragmatic errors of a total of 277(6.4%). Pragmatic errors include Chinglish errors 151(8.9%) and errors due to unclear expression of meanings 126(7.5%). The causes of topical coherence errors and the relational coherent errors are mainly psychological factors, the differences between the Chinese and British thinking modes and the inter-lingual interference. The causes of pragmatic errors are cultural differences, the students’ comprehensive English level and so on.There are 276 substance errors, accounting for 16.3%(ranking the third), Substance errors include punctuation errors 138(8.2%), spelling errors 95(5.6%), capitalization errors 43(2.5%). The main causes are the students’ lack of common sense of English and the interference of learners’ psychological factors.This study wants to cast the following enlightenment for future English writing teaching:First, the text error takes up the highest proportion, which indicates that the learners’ language skills are rather poor. Therefore the teachers should help learners to grasp the ways of memorizing and understanding words and grammars and how to use them in a certain context, to help learners to improve their English language skills. Learners should also strengthen their knowledge of words and grammar reinforcement and accumulation.Second, discourse errors on coherence are very typical. Many learners do not understand the topic, the connections between the sentences have nothing to do with each other and the sentences are illogical. Teachers should teach the learners to understand the topic and cultivate the learner’s capacity of logic and encourage learners to use all kinds of conjunctions to reach coherence. Pragmatic errors refer to the Chinese style English and errors due to unclear expression of meanings. To reduce pragmatic errors, the teachers should not only pay attention to language teaching to enhance learners’ cultural awareness but also cultivate learners’ logical thinking ability.Third, substance errors seem simple, but students often make errors because of carelessness. Teachers should teach students the basic knowledge of English writing, for instance: how to use capitalization and the English punctuation marks and so on.The purpose of this study is to help the teachers to explore the causes of errors in English writing, to understand the distribution of errors in the third year students of senior high school in English writing and to help the learners of different errors to take effective corrective actions, to aid teachers to carry out targeted teaching, so as to improve the efficiency of English writing teaching. At the same time, to offer some enlightenment of English learning for the third year students of senior high school and avoid similar mistakes in future writing.There are some limitations of the study to be pointed out. First, due to the limitation of time and place and so on, this article failed to explain the influence on the senior three student’s English writing in a detailed way, such as the students’ individual differences and the teachers’ way of English writing teaching, therefore the causes of errors need to be probed into further. Second, the subjects are all from the same grade of the third year students of the same senior high school and all the samples are collected in one examination which may not offer a comprehensive picture of the errors made by senior high schools in China.