A Study On Error Analysis Of English Writings Of Non-English Major Students

The major orientations of current study are to identify errors made by Non-English major students in the four different genres of English writings and to classify these errors into different categories,and then try to explore the sources of errors,thus,providing some pedagogical implications for the teaching of English writing.Specifically,this thesis is carried out to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the common errors in English writings for Non-English major students?How is the distribution of error frequency?(2)Is there any error distribution differences among four different genres?(3)What are the causes of these errors?The current research is text-analysis study with students' compositions and the participants were chosen from one natural class of Geographical Science major students in Hubei University.The study lasts two semesters,and the total number of the students is 40 at the second semester,but it reduced to 30 during the third semester because of some students changed to other majors.First,in the second semester,the author collected 40 argumentations titled "On Pressure",and 40 narrations titled "An unforgettable Experience".In their third semester,the author collected 30 expositions titled "How to Protect Your Eyes" and 30 practical writings titled "write a letter to the headmaster of your school about canteen".The total number of the compositions is 140.The author checked all the 140 samples with the help of an experienced English teacher.After a week,the author distributed the questionnaire to the 30 students.The major findings of this research are:(1)The most frequent errors occurring in the non-English major students' writings are text errors,among these errors,grammatical errors takes the first and lexical errors the second.(2)For the four different genres,there exists slightly difference between each other,grammatical errors are still the largest number of all the errors,lexical errors take the second,the third one is substance errors;discourse errors are the fewest.But in narration,substance errors occurred in the second and lexical errors is the third.(3)The sources of errors are mainly from two aspects,that is,interlingual interference and intralingual interference.Interlingual interference can be further divided into linguistic transfer,thought pattern transfer and culture transfer.Despite of the limitations of this study,the author has attempted to classify the errors occurred in the non-English major students' writings,and explore the sources of these error and provide some ways to treat errors.These research findings are supposed to be beneficial for the teaching of English writing in the future and may serve as reference for foreign language teachers as well as researchers in related fields.