Cause Analysis Of Common Errors In Letter Writing By Students Of Senior Three

Writing,as the most difficult language skill for students to master,play a vital role in English teaching in high school,college entrance examination and language communication.To a large extent,the errors in English composition reflect students’ writing level.Especially in recent years,senior high school and college entrance examination writings mainly focus on letter writings,in which the errors largely reflect the students’ problem.Therefore,based on contrastive analysis theory,error analysis theory,and interlanguage theory,this research attempts to find out the characteristics of error distribution and explore the causes of errors by analyzing 120 letter writing samples by senior high school students and provide enlightenment for students to learn English writing and English composition teaching in senior high school.Through analysis,it is found that students’ writing errors are mainly reflected in four levels: ontology,vocabulary,grammar(morphology and syntax),and discourse.At the ontological level,the error is mainly in spelling;the lexical level problems focus on semantic errors;at the grammatical level,syntactic errors are the most prominent,especially non-predicate verbs,tense,and voice errors.At the discourse level,the structure of the text is reasonable,but the awareness of text cohesion is still weak,and the logical connection is single in form and means.The causes of the above errors and phenomena are mainly related to mother tongue interference and mastery of the target language rules.The causes of errors are interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer,In the end,the author puts forward the following five suggestions for teachers’ teaching and students’ learning:strengthening pronunciation practice,grasping basic vocabulary,increasing language input,increasing sentence patterns and writing training,and cultivating target language thinking and cultural awareness.