A Study On Errors In English Writings Of Chinese Junior High School Students

There are five skills such as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating in English learning.In those skills, English writing is regarded as the most difficult one because it can not only reflect how the students' basic language knowledge of English is, but also make known students' abilities to use this kind of language. In English writing process, it is unavoidable that most of Chinese students are affected by Chinese which they have almost acquired before English learning, which makes English learning become a more complicated process, what's more, more and more errors are made by high school students in English writing because of the influence of mother tongue and the target language itself. The present paper is aimed at surveying and analyzing language errors in Chinese high school students' English writing through analyzing their English compositions, which is based on the Contrastive Analysis Theory and Error Analysis Theory.The subjects of the present study are 67 students from Grade 1, Class 12 in No.1 High School,Zhangxian County. The research questions in this study are as follow. The first one is that what kinds of errors do senior high school students make in English writings and what is the percentage of every type of errors. And the second one is that what are the main causes of errors in senior high school students' English writings.In the research process, the author firstly asks the 67 high school students to complete an English composition whose title is in one of the test papers of mid-term examination for the Grade 1 in 35 minutes.After having completed the compositions, students are asked to complete questionnaires about error analysis in students' English compositions which is quoted from Wang Wenhui's paper. Lastly, the author collects 67 questionnaires and 66 English compositions in all which are available for the study. Later, the author applies the method of combining qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to analyzes the questionnaires and compositions, and lastly makes some conclusions as follow. According to the data from students' compositions, firstly, there are 1006 errors in sampled compositions, in which there are 165 lexical errors which take up 16.4% of all the language errors and rank the second, and grammatical errors which rank the first take up 69.98%. Then discourse errors take up 13.62%, which is the least errors in sampled compositions. Secondly, there are three score levels among the sampled compositions,which are 5~10 score level(low score group), 11~15 score level(medium score group) and 16~23 score level(high score group), lexical errors are the most errors in low score group and the least errors in high scoregroup, grammatical errors are the same as lexical errors, but discourse errors is the most errors in medium score group and the least errors in high score group. Thirdly, the mean of grammatical errors is234.67, which is highest among the three kinds of language errors, it means that grammatical errors are the most errors exist in sampled compositions, moreover, the standard deviation of grammatical errors is also the highest among the three kinds of language errors, which means that students' grammar proficiency differentiates a lot from different score levels, while the standard deviation of lexical errors and discourse errors are much lower than that of grammatical errors, which indicates that students' lexical and discourse proficiency differentiate a little from different score levels. Fourthly, the relation between three kinds of errors is that the three kinds of errors are positive correlation between each other though the correlations are not significant. Fifthly, this paper finds out some main causes of these language errors, which includes interlingual causes such as influence of mother tongue at lexical level,grammatical level, discourse level, cultural level and thinking pattern, intralingual causes such as over-generalization, ignorance of rule restriction and other causes such as lack of English writing practice,improper learning or writing habits, the limitations of English learning environment. Lastly, there are some pedagogical implications from teachers' role as well as students' role for ESL teaching and learning.Certainly, there are also some limitations in this study, for example, the sample in this study is too small to represent English writing of the most Chinese students, the error classifications are not accurate and precise, and the process of data analysis is relatively simple in the study.