An Analysis Of Common Errors In English Compositions Of Students In Grade Nine

English writing is a basic skill for students in Grade Nine of compulsory education.The level of students' English writing directly reflects their comprehensive competence of language use.Specific requirements for junior high school students' English writing are also put forward in English Curriculum Standard for compulsory education.However,plenty of students in Grade 9 spend a large amount of time memorizing words and doing lots of exercises of cloze tests and reading comprehensions,and they neglect the importance of English writing in learning English.Therefore,it is crucial to research the classifications and reasons of errors in junior high school students' English compositions,so that students make fewer mistakes in their compositions and teachers find effective ways to improve students' English writing abilities.Based on the theories of error analysis and interlanguage,the author of this article has done the research of the students' mid-term English examination writings in Grade 9of Yan'an New Area Foreign Language School so as to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the types and distribution of common errors in Grade Nine students' English writing?(2)What are the main causes of the errors in Grade Nine students' English writing?200 essays in 4 classes are randomly selected from 600 essays of 12 classes in Grade 9,Yan'an New Area Foreign Language School.After screening,192 essays are considered to be valid.These essays are firstly typed in Correction Network to find the numbers and types of common errors.After careful correction and contrast,892 common errors are calculated.Then 892 errors are typed in Excel to calculate the percentage of the errors.Finally,in order to find out the causes of common errors in students' writing,theauthor has interviewed 7 teachers and 15 students related to the research.The results of this research show that common errors in English writing can be divided into three categories:(1)For the morphological errors: the errors of verbs are the most,especially the improper use of tense.The errors of noun are mainly constituted of the errors of singular and plural forms.What's more,students have difficulty in choosing the articles “a” or“an” before some content words and “the” is always misused.The errors of adjectives,adverbs,prepositions and pronouns are fewer.(2)For the syntactic errors: the most frequent errors are lack and redundancy of components in sentences.Then the errors of the subject-predicate disagreement are prominent,which are usually caused by breaking the principles of grammatical concord and proximity in use.Meanwhile,errors in sentence disorder and conjunction misuse are relatively fewer.(3)For the discourse: the sentence structure of students' writings is too simple and unitary.And the errors of discourse mainly embodies in cohesion and semantic coherence errors.The results of the sample analysis and interviews show that the errors are caused by interlingual,intralingual and training transfers.And also,errors are caused by simple English writing teaching methods,deficiency of students' basic language knowledge and lack of students' writing practice.In the end,the author of this study puts forward some specific teaching strategies to solve these problems,aiming to reduce common errors in students' English writing.