A Survey On The Current Situation Of Syntactic Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is an essential part of English learning,which can reflect the comprehensive language ability of senior high school students to a certain extent.However,in the process of English writing,high school students make syntactic errors,which will affect their steady improvement of English learning level,so it cannot be ignored.Therefore,an investigation on the current situation of syntactic errors in senior high school students’ English writing and explore the causes will contribute to English writing teaching and syntax teaching.Guided by the theory of error analysis,language transfer and cohesion,this paper takes senior high school students from a middle school in M City as research subjects,successively collects 340 compositions in three times and 167 students’ questionnaires,and interviews with 5 English teachers and 10 students from high-level group and 10 students from low-level group.Combined with composition samples,questionnaires and interviews,this paper analyzes the frequency of syntactic errors in senior high school students’ English compositions,the differences of syntactic errors between high-level group and low-level group,and the causes of syntactic errors in senior high school students’ English writing.The results show that:(1)as a whole,the frequency of incorrect sentences in senior high school English composition is high,accounting for nearly half of the total sentences,with an average of one wrong sentence in every three sentences.There are mainly eight types of syntactic errors in senior high school students’ English compositions,and the order of frequency from high to low is as follows: spelling errors,punctuation errors,Chinglish errors,conjunction errors,sentence fragments and redundancy,run-on sentences,subject-verb disagreement and capitalization errors.Among them,the first five syntactic errors are more numerous in number and type.(2)There are obvious differences in the number of syntactic errors and the attitude towards syntactic errors between high-level group and low-level group.Students in high-level group have a better grasp of punctuation marks and conjunctions.They tend to use more complex sentences,rich vocabulary and conjunctions in their compositions,and the overall quality of their compositions is high.The frequency of syntactic errors in the aspect of Chinglish errors in low-level group is significantly higher than that of high-level group,which is manifested in the wrong arrangement of word order and misuse of parts-of-speech.The students in low-level group do not pay attention to syntactic errors as much as those in high-level group.On the whole,they lack the awareness of error correction and their attitude towards error correction is not positive.(3)The main causes of syntactic errors in senior high school students’ English writing include negative transfer of mother tongue,lack of syntactic knowledge,negative attitude and inappropriate habit in syntax learning and writing,and excessive generalization of rules.In addition,the teaching mode of syntactic writing and correcting syntactic errors are relatively single,and teachers’ feedback of syntactic errors in students’ compositions is not timely.On the basis of the above research results,this paper puts forward some suggestions and measures for the syntax teaching of senior high school English writing,hoping to reduce the syntax errors in senior high school students’ English writing and improve students’ English writing ability.