An Error Analysis Of English Writing From Senior High Ethnic Minority Students

A large number of errors exist in the writings of senior high school students at present.There are even more for ethnic minority students who are in Pu'er Ethnic Minority Middle School where the author works.English teachers have made great effort to eliminate and prevent the errors but the outcome isn't very effective and they haven't achieved their primary goal.They are confused about how to conduct efficient writing teaching.Up to now,the researches on writing errors lack sufficient quantities and ignore the systemic analysis of ethnic minority students' writing errors so that English teachers are in the vague about the identification,classification,explanation and evaluation of writing errors existing in ethnic minority students.The author attempts to solve these problems by collecting and analyzing writing errors from senior ethnic minority students in this study.In this study,200 writing samples are collected from four writing tests of 50 ethnic minority students.The research subjects are divided into four groups depending on their identities of ethnicities.Mainly based on Error Analysis,Contrastive Analysis and Interlanguage theories,the study collects,identifies,classifies,explains and evaluates writing errors.The classification of errors is in the light of Carl Jame's way,which contains substance,text and discourse errors.Substance errors mainly contain capital and lower case letter errors,punctuation errors and misspelling errors.Text errors consist of lexical errors and grammatical errors.Discourse errors can be divided into cohesive errors and pragmatic errors.In addition to collecting and analyzing the writing samples and questionnaires through quantitative method,the qualitative method is also applied in interviews with English teachers aiming to achieve the scientific and efficient results in the study.The final results of the study indicate(1)that there are no distinct differences in proportions of errors among various ethnic minority students;(2)that the most frequent errors are morphological errors which mainly result from intra-lingual negative transfer.This implies that English teachers should attach great importance to vocabulary andgrammar teaching in specific context;(3)that plenty of syntactic errors,which cover absence of sentence elements,disorder of sentence pattern errors,wrong sequence of sentence errors,clause errors and Chinglish sentences errors,appear mainly by being influenced of inter-lingual negative transfer.This suggests that English teachers should expand the input exercises of authentic reading and reciting English materials.Meanwhile,the writing practice of output also should be emphasized.Both sufficient input and output practice are essential to overcome the interference of inter-lingual negative transfer;(4)error correction in writing practice plays an important part in eliminate writing errors.It is suggested that errors should be corrected each other by students' group members firstly and then turn in for teachers to correct again.Finally,students are required to explain the causes of errors and rewrite them.Errors in English writing of ethnic minority students are inevitable and are normal phenomenon.The thesis answers three research questions and has achieved the research aims in a certain way through precise error analysis and research,hoping it is helpful to practical teaching.