A Study On Verb Errors And Causes In High School Students’ English Writing

The teaching of English writing has always been an important part of high school English teaching.Students’ writing level reflects their mastery and application of comprehensive English knowledge to a certain extent.In the process of learning English writing,it is inevitable for students to make errors.Therefore,how to help students reduce the errors in writing and improve the accuracy of students’ writing and writing ability has become a problem which is worth thinking about for teachers.Based on the theory of error analysis and interlanguage theory,the study takes the students of Class 9,senior two,Yan’an Experimental Middle School as the research subjects.188 writing texts are selected from the mid-term exam and three daily writing as research samples,and 161 valid texts are obtained after removing invalid texts.Text analysis method is used to study the verb errors in students’ writing texts.Interview method and classroom observation method are used to study the causes of making errors.It aims to answer the following two questions: First,what are the types of verb errors frequently made by senior two students in English writing? Second,what are the causes for errors in English writing of senior two students?The results show that there are 393 verb errors in students’ writing,and the frequency of verb errors in descending order are tense errors,verb redundancy/absence,subject-verb inconsistency,non-predicate verb errors,errors of verb spelling,errors of verb form after modal verbs and voice errors.They accounted for 28.7%,20.6%,20.4%,17.3%,6.1%,5.9% and 1% respectively.Combined with the interview method,it is found that the causes for students’ errors mainly include interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer and non-linguistic factors.Based on the verb errors in students’ writing,this paper puts forward the following five teaching and learning suggestions:First,teachers and students should treat the errors in students’ writing correctly;Second,strengthen students’ grammatical awareness of verbs;Third,strengthen the input of English language to reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue;Fourth,strengthen the accuracy and standardization of teacher’s language and avoid absolute language;Fifth,rich and diversified evaluation methods.