Error Analysis On English Writing Of Non-English Majors And Construction Of Writing Teaching Strategies

In college English teaching and learning,writing as an important form of output has gained little attention.Also it is a common phenomenon that in various English tests in colleges,writing scores are always the lowest.From their test papers,writing errors could embody both weaknesses in writings and reasons why they commit errors.Motivated by this fact,a lot of scholars have already conducted analyses of learners'writing errors based on Error Analysis Theory.But this paper tries to combine "i+1”Input hypothesis with analysis of writing errors in order to construct strategies for teachers in teaching English writing rather than merely focusing on the errors themselves and the causes.In addition,this paper would investigate whether there is significant correlation between compositions' scores and different kinds of errors.This research will mainly focus on resolving three key issues:1)For students in low-level,medium level and advanced-level,which part(lexical learning,grammar learning,discourse learning)they separately prefer to learn or recognize as the most effective element in improving their writing level?2)Is there any significant correlation between the three categories of errors and composition scores?3)Based on "i+1”Input Hypothesis,what teaching strategies of every part in English writing should be built by teachers?In the study of this thesis,230 compositions are selected randomly from non-English major sophomores in parallel classes in a university in Shanxi and the author has done classifications and analyses of all errors in these compositions.The study of the errors has found that:among all the three categories of errors,the percentage of grammar errors is much bigger,followed by lexical errors.Nevertheless,percentage of discourse errors in each group takes up less than 10%.Among grammar errors,the first three kinds of errors students tend to make are those in disorder sentences,verb inflections and tense.Among lexical errors,the biggest percentage is property errors,with errors on collocation and spelling ranking next.Though there are only three subcategories in discourse errors in this study,the conditions differ from each other.Students in low-level and advanced-level are much easier to make errors on conjunctions.With regard to medium level students,percentages on chinglish and conjunctions are similar,which are both higher than that on mismatching meaning.In order to gain a better knowledge and deeper understanding of the current situation of learning and problems in writing,all the subjects from the three groups are asked to fill in a questionnaire.The total number of valid questionnaires is 230,which would be used as the research material.After that,the author selects 10 subjects randomly from each group and carries out an interview.The results of questionnaire and interview together indicate that more students in low-level have thought the volume of vocabulary is much more important in improving their writing ability.And more students in medium level think grammar learning is more important while more students in advanced group prefer to learn knowledge on discourse most.Though through correlation analysis by SPSS only lexical errors bear significant correlation with English writing scores as the grammar errors and discourse errors do affect the writing scores to a certain degree,it is rational to believe that even though grammar errors and discourse errors have no significance with scores of English writing,they two do have correlations with it.According to the results of above data and based on "i+1" Input Hypothesis,the author will construct five teaching strategies on writing for students of different writing proficiency,so as to help students improve English writing level.