An Analysis On Preposition Errors In Senior High School Students' English Writing

As an important role in English tests,writing in senior high school is also the m ain form of output in English learning.Ho wever,the ability of s tudents' English writing is not optimistic so far.In particular,those errors related to p repositions appeared in s tudents' compositions should attract our at tention.Therefore,the analysis on the errors connected to prepositions in senior h igh school students' composition can help teachers know about how well students grasp En glish and p rovide numerous teachers with practicable pedagogic implications.Based on the error analysis th eory and inter-language theory,300 students of dif ferent grades in Z hangzhou N0.3 Middle School were taken as the objectives and their English compositions of different grades in midterm exam were collected in this study,which aims to analyze the preposition errors in students writing and the data with the instrument of SPSS software in order to s olve the following questions: 1)What is th e overall situation of preposition errors in senior high school students' English compositions? What is the situation of each dimension? 2)What is the overall situation of preposition errors in the s tudents of different grades in their English co mpositions? What is the situation of each di mension? Is there any d ifference? 3)What is the dif ference between the high-score groups and the low-score groups in preposition errors? Is there any correlation between the high-score groups and the low-score groups' preposition errors and their English achievement?The results show that: 1)pr eposition errors account for 36.57 percent in total errors in high school students' writing,fixed phrase usage errors and underuse errors are the two m ost commonly used types of preposition errors made by senior high school students.2)preposition errors in the high school students' writing are decreasing with grade level.And in the four kinds of preposition errors,there are significant differences in the collocation errors,fixed phrase usage errors and underuse errors,except the overuse errors m ade by the students of different grades.3)There is a significan t difference in preposition errors between high-score students and low-score students.In the four kinds of preposition errors,there are significant differences in the collocation errors,fixed phrase usage errors,and underuse errors between high-score students and low-score students,except the overuse errors.4)There is a significant negative correlation be tween preposition errors in students' writing and their English writing achievem ent.5)In addition,it can be learned from the questionnaire and survey results between teachers and students th at most of t he high sch ool students do not attach great im portance to English prepos itional learning and students hold dif ferent understanding toward the im pact of language transfer on English prepositional learning.But in general,it is more positive than negative in their attitudes.Finally,the author puts forward som e pedagogical implications according to the research results: such as understanding the differences between English and Chinese to reduce inter-lingual transfer errors,m astering basic kn owledge to reduce the in fra-lingual transfer errors,reinforcing the English writing traini ng and attaching great importance to English prepositional learning,which aims to provide reference for the vast teachers and students.