Error Analysis In Letter Writing By Senior Students And Countermeasures

As an international language,English is of great importance.Among the four basic language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,writing is the most difficult and can best reflect learners' language level.Senior high school students' English writing ability is generally lower than the other three basic skills.The errors in compositions largely reflect students' writing level.This study attempts to improve students' writing ability by analyzing their writing samples,finding out the characteristics of error distribution,exploring the eauses of errors,and finding ways to improve writing in both teaching and learning.Based on the theories of contrastive analysis,error analysis and interlanguage,this study uses the method of error analysis to analyze the writing samples of three different topics(50 samples for each topic)by high school students in grade three,aiming to find answers to the following three questions:(1)What types of errors are there in students'English compositions?(2)What are the characteristics of error distribution?(3)What are the causes of the errors?Through the analysis and discussion,this study gets the following findings:Students' writing errors are mainly in the levels of substance(spelling),lexis,syntax and discourse.In substantial level,there are not so many spelling errors,which are mainly in the form of vowel errors and omission of silent consonants.In lexical level,there are much more errors and the top three errors are verb errors,preposition errors and noun errors.Besides,the percentage ranges of preposition errors as well as noun errors are relatively larger than other types of words,which to some extent indicates that different topics have a great influence on preposition error distribution and noun error distribution and have less influence on other categories of error distribution in lexical level.In syntactic level,sentence patterns are simple;sentence structures are confusing;some sentence components are missing;Chinglish is very common.In discourse level,textual structures are reasonable,but the cohesive markers are rather simple and of little variety.The causes of the above errors and phenomena are mainly related to the interference of mother language and the mastery of the rules of target language.By analyzing errors and exploring the causes,the author puts forward the following suggestions for both teachers' teaching and students' learning:strengthening pronunciation practice,enlarging vocabulary,increasing language input and training in both sentence patterns and writing,cultivating the way of thinking and cultural awareness of target language.