Analysis Of IL Written Production Errors Sampled From Student Essays For The Writing Test On NMET 2002 (Beijing)

Writing, as an important skill of output, is an indispensable goal for EFL learning. However, both the Chinese senior middle school students and their English teachers find it a very difficult task to achieve this goal. The current study, which focuses on the analysis of IL written production errors sampled from student essays for the writing test on NMET 2002 (Beijing) intends to give them some help by bringing in a systematic perspective for a close look at the collected errors on the belief that the errors a learner makes can provide important evidences for us to draw out the system of the language that he is using (i.e. has learned) at a particular point in the course.Based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, and applying both the methods of quantitive analysis and qualitive analysis, the present thesis analyzes the sampled errors in two different dimensions. The analysis of Corpus One - 100 samples randomly selected to generalize the errors which occur in the compositions written by the senior middle school graduates in the writing test on NMET (Beijing) shows that most of the errors are on the lexis-level (e.g. verb errors and article errors) or grammar-level (e.g. collocation errors) while the analysis of Corpus Two, a sub-corpus made up of forty compositions (half <20>with marks over 21 and the other half <20>below 12) for analyzing differences in basic linguistic features between good compositions and poor ones, shows that the advanced students who were rich in vocabulary and adequate in sentence structure produced longer and more complicated sentences.Based on the results of the study, some pedagogical suggestions are put forwardto both the Chinese senior middle school teachers and the students in the hope of better facilitating their teaching and learning of English writing.