A Study On English Writing Errors Of Junior High School Students Based On Theories Of Error Analysis And Interlanguge

Writing is an important part of the four basic skills in English.It can reflect the situation of students’ basic knowledge of English and their comprehensive ability to use language.In 2011,the New Curriculum Standard(junior high school)that was issued by the Ministry of Education also set forth higher and more specific requirements on junior high school students’ English writing.Nevertheless,objectively speaking,in daily English writing,the students do not perform well.In fact,there always are a variety of errors in junior high school students’ writing.English writing has been a very difficult problem faced by the teachers and the students.With the development of the language research,more and more scholars have realized that it is actually not easy to avoid the errors,but analyzing the errors can help us understand students’ learning process and strategies and consequently to help them correct their errors more effectively.By collecting and analyzing relevant literature,the author found that most researchers took college students and senior high school students as the subjects,leaving out the junior high school students and the researches focused on the junior high school students were relatively rare.Looking back to the only empirical studies on junior high school students,the author found that the researchers all aimed at the overall errors in the learners’ writing but paid little attention to the differences in error performances due to different language proficiency levels.Also,they tended to find out the reasons according to the language outcome without exploring the psychological process of making errors.So these two aspects are the areas that this paper attempts to break through.Based on the error analysis theory and the interlanguage theory,this study chose the students in Grade 9 in Tongsheng Junior High School as subjects and used a writing task in the mid-term English examination and some interviews,aiming to answer the following three research questions:(1)What types of errors are often made by junior high school students in English writing? What are the distributions of these errors?(2)What are the distributions of different types of errors in different Englishproficiency students’ writing? Are there any differences?(3)What are the main sources of the errors in English writing of junior high school students?The author randomly chose 149 test papers of 3 classes from 12 classes(607 students)in Grade 9 as research samples after the mid-term examination of the first semester of 2016-2017.After getting rid of the invalid papers,finally,we had 139 valid papers and there existed1214 errors in total,which were then divided into the following three categories: substance errors,lexical errors and grammar errors.To start with,the author made overall descriptive statistical analysis on errors.Next,the author compared every kind of errors in different English proficiency students’ writings through the one-way ANOVA of SPSS 21.0 to test whether the error distribution differences of every kind of errors among students in different groups are significant or not.According to the above research,we drew three conclusions: First,the writing errors of junior high school students were divided into three categories: substance errors,grammar errors and lexical errors.After the statistical analysis of these errors,it was found that the highest proportion of the writing errors was grammar errors,followed by substance errors and lexical errors.Secondly,in total,there was an inverse relationship between the number of students’ errors and their English proficiency.More concretely,as for grammar errors,the differences between groups were all significant.As for substance errors,there were significant differences between the low-score group and the other two groups,but there was no significant difference between high-score group students and middle-score group students.Similarly,as for lexical errors,there were significant differences between the low-score group and the other two groups.There was no significant difference between high-score group students and middle-score group students.Thirdly,according to the samples and interviews,we knew that the errors were mainly caused by the interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer,lack of practice,lack of good writing habits,induced factors,and some emotional factors.Finally,the author put forward some pedagogical implications.