A Research On Error Analysis And Correction In English Writing Of Vocational Middle Schools

As we all know, writing, as an important skill of language output, is an indispensable goal for EFL learning. Therefore, in Basic English teaching, the ability to write is considered to be one of the four basic skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) that the students must master. However, writing has long been a weak point in vocational middle school English teaching practice. The students can only get a low score in the test, which, to some extent, greatly influenced their English scores. What are the causes of this? From the author's ten years English teaching experience, she finds that there exist lots of errors, most of which are lexical errors and grammatical errors. In order to improve the students'English writing skill, the author made the experiment. In Part I, she explains the reasons for the present research, presents the research questions and also illustrates the significance of learners'errors. Then in Part II and Part III, she collected some commonly committed errors in vocational middle school students'compositions, then she employed the theories of CA, EA and IL to analyze them.This paper is an attempt to deal with these written errors. In Part IV, a survey was made by the author beforehand. In the survey, two questionnaires are designed which concern the students and the teachers'attitudes towards error and error correction respectively. The questionnaire concerning the students was randomly distributed to 190 Vocational students of Mancheng; and 30 English teachers from two vocational schools were asked to answer the questionnaire as well. The result shows that almost all the students and teachers hold positive attitude toward errors and most of them prefer students'self-correction. Is the students'self-correction more effective? In order to testify this, the author made an experiment on error correction techniques, one is the traditional way---teachers correct all the errors; the other is student-self correction. The students of the experiment are from two parallel classes, who are both from Grade 1 in the vocational middle school of Man Cheng; the experiment lasted for about one term. According to the analysis of the pre-test and post-test of the students'writings, the author reached the conclusion that students' self-correction is more effective than total teacher correction. Later, as to how the students think of these correction techniques, the author made an interview among the students.Based on the study of the students'errors and correction techniques, in Part V, the author illustrates the findings and discusses the results of the experiment. Then in Part VI, some implications and suggestions are discussed for EFT in the future; Limitations of the present study are touched upon as well. Later, the conclusion of the thesis is given in Part VII.