An Error Analysis Of Senior High Students' English Writing Based On Error Theory

In the age of information, as the international communication becomes more and more frequent, our country has strengthened the communication with other countries in politics,economy, culture and education, and so on. English, as an international language, becomes a medium of the intercourse among different cultures. Our society eagerly require talented persons in English and therefore our English teaching should meet the need and cultivate such persons. As we all know, of all the four basic skills of language learning: listening, speaking,reading and writing, writing is one of the indispensable components of language skills,however, it is a weak point in English teaching. As an English teacher in high middle school,the author has read and corrected many students' English writing, thus being familiar with the common mistakes in students' English writing. This paper aims to study the errors in students' compositions and attempts to find out the reasons for their mistakes. Moreover, the author tries to give some suggestions to the teachers in teaching, propose some reasonable advice for students in learning, finally improving the students' English writing.This research adopted qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis together, besides,using pigai.org as one of means to analyze. During the study, the author collected two compositions of the students, one of which is the English writing of the monthly exam in September, 2015, 125 papers were received in total. On the basis of error category proposed by Carl James, also by Professor Liu Shangfu's category, and the author's years of teaching experience, writing errors are divided into four aspects, that is, substance errors, lexical errors,syntax errors and discourse errors. By applying the standard of the error category to the received samples, 514 errors are counted in all. As to the second one, the author assigned a letter of thanks on the pigai.org as research sample, receiving 118 of the students' assignments submitted through the system, including 280 errors by the Net. The author had a thorough understanding of the students' writing level, at the same time, analyzed and discussed the causes of these errors in order to enlighten the current English Writing teaching and learning.The results of the study have shown that the reasons for the errors are mainly in mother-tongue or interlingual interference and intralingual interference, also other factors, to be specific, the author think it may be involved in the following aspects, for one thing, which are influenced by teachers, teaching materials and teaching methods and so on, for another,which are related to students themselves, for example, physical and mental factors. Owing to the limit of research, in this article, the author didn't think over other factors, just listed carelessness as one. Interlingual interference is caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue, and intralingual interference mainly presented four aspects: overgeneralization,ignorance of rule restriction, incomplete rule application and false concept hypothesized.Last but not least, the author puts forward the suggestions to both the teachers' teaching and the students' learning according to the results of the above research, aiming at students' writing proficiency, interest in learning and writing confidence improving and finally their English writing level being promoted, furthermore, the author also hopes to make a guidance for future English teaching.