A Study Of Errors In College English Test4 And Its Pedagogical Implication

Language learning is a slow and arduous process in which learners will inevitably make errors. Language learning was regarded as habit formation and learners' errors were treated as unwanted forms and avoided at all cost. However, by the end of 1960s, with the focus of applied linguistics shifted from the language teacher to the language learner, the errors committed began to have a high research value. The teacher, based on the systematic analysis of students' errors, will get some ideas of how far towards the goal they have progressed and, consequently, what remains for them to learn. The very fact that learners' error can be identified, classified, and analyzed will reveal the development of built-in system operation with learners. This kind of research is called Error Analysis, which is closely concerned with language teaching and learning. As is well known, writing ability is rather weak of five language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. Especially in CET4, the score of composition is always very low.This research focuses on linguistic classification of common errors committed in the compositions by the students in College English Test for Band Four. And then the diagnosis-based explanation of error sources is offered. In this study, the corpus is 100 compositions written by second grade non-English majors of Beijing Forestry University who will participate in CET 4. The SPSS for Windows analyzed the data obtained from the test. The analysis is in three aspects:the lexicon, syntax, and discourse. Currently the research in CET4 writing is few, especially in the lexicon level. This study aims supply some extending and complement in the research of the current English writing. At present, many scholars have done a lot of studies in English writing, but for CET4 compositions, there is not much attention. So this study collects a large number of CET4 writing as the corpus aimed to provide useful and necessary complement for the English writing research. In this study, the errors appear in CET4 writing will be analyzed systematically to help the students to avoid these kinds of errors, and make their writing more accurate and appropriate. Also it aimed at helping teachers find some pedagogical keystone and difficult. Finally, this study also expected to present some enlightment to improve the students' English ability.