A Study Of The English Writing Errors In A Shenzhen Junior High School

Errors in students’ English writings cause not only failure to express their ideas,but also bring trouble for readers to catch their meaning.What’s worse is that repeated errors may become fossilized if left unheeded.And in the long run the fossilized errors prevent students’ from using English correctly.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the ways to help the subjects to reduce writing errors by analyzing the types of errors and the causes of errors in their writings.The author collects 352 compositions from 44 students in Class 12,Grade 2,Luohu Middle School and modifies 1044 sentences and fragments.Through analysis,there are 1399 error points altogether.According to Burt’s error classification guidance and the actual situation in this study,the errors were divided into three types: local errors;global errors;and other errors.The author then classifies and analyzes each kind of errors,and explains the features of them with the examples of the students’ actual errors.Interviews among teachers and the subjects are carefully conducted and the conversation are recorded and noted by the author.According to the teacher interview results,the ways to reduce the identified errors are: to recite the original English article;to lead students have a good understanding of phrases and basic sentence structures;to design some error correcting questions and give feedback;to give the students dictation every day;to cultivate a good habit of keeping an English diary;to train them to use a variety of expressions to describe the same things;to clearly clarify the parts of speech of words when explaining words to students;to give students instructions on how to memorize in an appropriate way and so on.According to Burt’s error classification guidance,these methods are also analyzed and classified according to different types of errors in this paper.In addition,the results of students’ interviews show that teachers should try to use different kinds of error correction feedback to the students according to their different needs.