A Causal Analysis Of Typical Grammatical Errors In Compositions By Rural High School English Learners

Although there have been many studies on writing errors of second language learners in recent years,there are few studies on those by junior high school students,particularly those from rural areas.Under the guidance of contrastive analysis,error analysis and interlanguage theory,this paper collects 179 students' English compositions in the mid-term and final examination papers from the three grades of a junior high school in the rural area of Zhejiang Province.From the pilot study two most common errors are obtained –“omission of subjects” and “tense errors”,whose specific manifestations are sought after in the students' performances at different levels and grades.His paper then analyses the underlying causes of students' errors so that they may shed light on English composition instruction in rural junior high schools.Through the analysis and research,the author has made the following findings:(1)As to “omission of subjects”,students in the lower grades lack the concept of English sentence structure,and are liable to make sentences without subjects;in contrast,students in the eighth-and ninth-grade do have the concept of subjects but their errors are mostly in the choice of the correct word forms for subjects.(2)As for “tense errors”,with the improvement of grammatical knowledge,students tend to confuse the verb forms in tense structures.In examinations,simple present tense is often used.As a result,students may make errors such as violation of the principle of subject-predicate consistency,abuse of be verbs and wrongly writing of negative sentences.Subsequently,the author makes a detailed analysis of the causes of the errors from both objective and subjective aspects.Based on the causes of errors,the author also puts forward relevant teaching suggestions from bothobjective and subjective aspects.There are six chapters in this paper.The first one is the introduction,which analyses the problems in junior high school English writing teaching,especially in rural areas,and discusses the significance and purpose of this paper.Chapter Two is the literature review,including theoretical support: comparative analysis,error analysis and interlanguage;domestic and foreign reviews of errors;the definition and classification of errors.The third chapter is the research design,which introduces the purpose and problems of the research and analyses the collected data.Chapter Four analyses the materials and discusses the causes of these errors.Chapter Five establishes the relationship between the causes of grammatical errors and the teaching methods of English writing,and puts forward some suggestions for improvement.Chapter Six is the conclusion.