Error Analysis And The Improvement Of High School Students' English Writing Proficiency

Writing in English reflects students' comprehensive learning of the English language. It not only requires the students of a solid foundation in English, but their ability to analyze the topic for writing, brainstorm for proper details, use the language flexibly, and organize the structure in a way both lucid and expressive. Therefore, to write a good English essay is no easy work. Teachers often meet with various errors made by the students and no matter what painstaking efforts both sides have made, errors seem to be unavoidable. Since the traditional method of error-correction has been found ineffective to improve learners' writing ability, it is imperative for us to find new teaching strategies and take countermeasures based on the different types of errors. Starting from the definition of error, the significance of error analysis and the reasons for committing such errors, the author has applied the theory of error analysis to her teaching practice and offered some countermeasures to solve problems in students' writing.Accordingly, the author has categorized errors into four major types: mechanic errors, grammatical errors, and errors at the lexical and textual levels. The first type mainly consists of errors in punctuation and capitalization, the second type errors in verbs, articles, pronouns and sentence structures, the third type errors in collocation, parts of speech and spelling, and the last type errors in cohesion and coherence.This paper comprises five chapters.Chapter I is an introduction, dealing with the importance of English writing and the purpose and significance of this study.Chapter II is a literature review, focusing on the definition of errors, theories about error analysis and the significance of studying errors.Chapter III describes the present situation of high school students' English writing, classifying errors into different types and analysing the reasons for these errors.Chapter IV is an action research, in which the author makes a data analysis on 94 senior three students' English writings, analyzes the errors and arrives at a conclusion.Chapter V is the implications of the study. It suggests possible ways to improve high school students' English writing.