Error Analysis Of Senior High School Students' English Writing On Grammar Level

Error Analysis is the process of determining the incidence,nature,causes and consequences of language errors.Grammar is an important and difficult part of English learning,which aims to enable students to master the structural rules of English in order to build and develop students' comprehensive use of English language skills.English learning is a very complex process in which learners are inevitable to make grammatical errors from time to time.This study intends to utilize the Error Analysis theory to explore the senior high school students' English writing errors on grammar level and to make an in-depth analysis of the sources of these errors.The author collects and sorts 120 English compositions by senior two students of Nanchang NO.3 Middle School form the English final writing test and interview 12 students with two questions,identifies grammatical errors they make in the essay and classifies them based on Carl James' error classification framework,to find out the general picture of grammatical errors,the characteristics of errors at grammar level in students' writing process and analyze the reason after that,then explore some enlightenment on English teaching.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis in this study,the major findings are drawn as follows:1)In students' English writing,there are 449 grammatical errors,which can be divided into two categories: syntactic errors and morphological errors,the number of syntactic errors is 243,the number of morphological errors is 206,and the percentage of syntactic errors is higher than morphological errors.The number of omission errors is 63,occupying 14.03%,which ranks first in terms of frequency and proportion among the grammatical errors.2)At the morphological level,errors are most frequently committed in terms of number.Article ranks the second and the third comes derivation.The number of errors ranks from high to low: number,article,derivation,pronoun,tense/aspect,comparative degree and superlative degree.At the syntax level,omission and subjective-object structure' errors are higher than others in the students' compositions,the errors on omission are more serious than the subjective-object structure.The number of errors ranks from high to low: omission,subjective-object structure,run-on sentences,subject-verb disagreement,word order,redundancy,passive voice.The results of this study have revealed the causes of these errors: mother tongue interference,lack of grammatical knowledge and so on.Furthermore,the author suggests the correct attitude language teachers are supposed to take toward these errors,some corresponding solutions to the existing problems,the pedagogical implications for future English writing practice,the limitations of the current study,and the suggestions for future research.