An Empirical Study On Errors In High School Students' English Writing

English,as an instrument of communication,has an important role in the international community.In high school English teaching,listening,speaking,reading,and writing are regarded as the four essential skills,however,of which teaching English writing is not only the most difficult but also the weakest part.Because the main means of assessment for English teaching is the examination,and the writing part in the national English college entrance examination accounts for only 25 points,affected by the examination,teachers and students think it easy to ignore writing teaching and learning,resulting in students' making numerous errors in their writing.Therefore,through experiments,the author attempts to investigate the problems and explore the causes of students' writing errors,find effective ways of learning and teaching English writing,and then improve students' English writing capability.In this paper,on the basis of Corder's error analysis theory and language transfer,the author conducted the survey through experiments and interviews.The author chooses the students of Senior Two as the research subjects,collects 60 students' compositions as the research text,and then classifies and analyzes the errors made by the students.Through the analysis,findings are as follows:in lexical level,errors are mainly in the use of verbs,articles,prepositions and nouns;in syntactic level,the long sentences can not be used flexibly and the sentence structure is confusing and influenced by Chinese thinking;in discourse level,structure is not a big problem,but the form of discourse is usually too single.Through the study of student's text errors,combined with the author's interviews with students and teachers,the author found that the main causes of errors are related to the mother tongue interference,differences between English and Chinese language structure and thinking modes,which will inevitably decide that students will make errors during the process of learning English,while English learning and teaching mode also affects the students' writing ability.After the analysis of errors and causes,the author try to bring up some practical suggestions on English learning and teaching:deal with errors correctly and minimize the negative transfer of mother tongue in learning process;learners and teachers should establish positive learning and teaching attitude;teachers should improve their teaching modes,using various means to increase the language input and output,giving timely error feedback,paying attention to classroom language,improving the pragmatic awareness.Finally,the author hopes that this study can offer some guidance or suggestions to teaching,minimize students' writing errors,and ultimately improve students' English writing capability.