Investigation And Research On English Writing Errors Of Non-English Majors And Its Enlightenment To English Teaching

"Listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating" are the five main aspects of English teaching,among which writing is one of the most difficult language skills to master.Facts have proved that there are always various mistakes in students’ compositions.How to systematize all kinds of errors made by students and turn them into valuable resources for students to learn in the future is a problem that scholars and English teachers have always been concerned about.Therefore,it is very important to sort out,classify and analyze the causes of writing errors.In this paper,218 non-English major students in class A of Tongda College of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications are taken as the research objects.218 samples(42662 words in total)of students’ English compositions are collected,and a small corpus is built.This research is based on comparative analysis theory,error analysis theory and interlanguage theory.Data statistics and text analysis are carried out.Combined with the questionnaire survey,the causes of errors in students’ English compositions are discussed.This article mainly answers the following four research questions:(1)What are the common mistakes made by non-English major college students in writing in this survey,and how are writing errors related to grades?(2)What are the differences in writing errors among college students of different grades?(3)What are the causes of non-English major college students’ writing errors in English composition texts?(4)What is the relationship between the four dimensions in the questionnaire survey(writing attitude,writing habits,writing difficulties,and teachers ’correction methods)and students’ English writing?The research shows that in the survey of College Students’ English writing,in terms of the overall analysis of the amount of errors,the two grades have the most lexical errors,the second is the amount of morphological errors,and the third is the amount of sentence errors.There is a very high negative correlation between the amount of errors in the English compositions of freshmen and sophomores and the students’ compositions.In addition,the errors in the seven dimensions of word form,vocabulary,verb phrase,noun phrase,collocation,preposition and adverb are more in sophomore than in freshman,and the errors in the other three dimensions,such as sentence,pronoun and adjective,are less in sophomore than in freshman.Questionnaire survey shows that most of the students are aware of the importance of English writing,and most of them are very interested in English writing,and think it is necessary to carry out some writing training,but most of the students feel that English writing is difficult,which is reflected in the small vocabulary;the lack of grammar application ability;the simple sentence structure;the repeated emergence of Chinglish,etc.In addition,after analyzing the questionnaire data,it was found that the underlying reason for the students ’writing errors was the writing errors caused by the students’ own bad writing attitudes and writing habits,and the writing difficulties that the students had difficulty mastering,which resulted in the writing errors.In the last chapter of this paper,the author puts forward some suggestions for writing teaching through the feedback from students’ English Writing:(1)Teachers should increase and strengthen the input of the target language,so that students can understand the cultural differences between English and Chinese,and reduce the impact of negative transfer of mother tongue;(2)Teachers should pay attention to the teaching of language foundation,so that students can master the rules of the target language,and reduce the impact of intralingual transfer;(3)Guide students to use communication strategies correctly,and avoid excessive use of avoidance strategies;(4)Cultivate students’ good writing habits and attitudes;(5)Strengthen the teaching guidance and training of students’ English writing.In addition,the author suggests that teachers should adopt different teaching methods according to different types of errors.This paper also provides the following suggestions for college students to improve their English writing ability: College students need to form good writing habits;they should pay attention to the neatness of the paper and writing standards;they also need to pay attention to the training of English thinking;encourage students extensive reading and strengthen the writing training;students can use appropriate correction software,etc.Due to the small sample size and the single target school,the above conclusions need to be further verified in the future.