Analysis Of Types Of Errors In English Compositions By Students From A Public High School Versus An International School

Error analysis is an activity which is at once ancient and new. It is ancient in that since ancient times this technique has been used by teachers, but in an informal and intuitive way. It is new because as a scientific technique based on psycholinguistics it was developed in the late sixties. Until then for two decades, the prevailing technique used in the study of errors of L2 learners had been contrastive analysis, which ascribed most errors to interference of the first language. But empirical evidence has shown that interlingual errors only constitute a small proportion of L2 learner's errors, and that among other factors, intralingual effects of learning play an important role. Contrastive analysis which aimed to predict errors resulting from L1 interference failed to account for other types of errors. Along with the Chomskyan revolution and the birth of psycholinguistics, the focus in second language teaching shifted from the view of the teacher as the controller of language learning towards a more learner-centered view which stresses learners'creative role in L2 learning. One major result of this shift has been the development and the application of error analysis as a chief means of both assessing learners'learning in general and of the degree of match between their learning"syllabus"and the teacher's teaching one. And in 1972, Selinker raises the idea of Interlanguage, which refers to the transitional period between the mother tongue and target language, since then, error analysis becomes important in researching the learner's language.With the development of the society and the development of the globalization, the communication between countries increases a lot; all the countries try to learn the other countries'cultures. As a fast growing developing country, China learns the advanced knowledge from abroad. Not only do many students go to abroad to study, the education in domestic develops towards internationalization. In recent years, many international schools in which the teaching method is the same with the western countries appear in large cities. As a coastal open city, a lot of people come to Qingdao to visit or settle down. Facing the globalization, the status of foreign language, especially English, improves. As an important way to improve English studying and promote the national quality, many bilingual international schools in which English is the main teaching language appear.This paper mainly uses quantitative analysis, analyzing the two senior high schools'students'essays. One school is a public school, the other school is a bilingual international school in which the teaching pattern is completely western, the courses are all taught by foreign teachers, and the textbook is also of English version..By comparing the errors in the essays written by the two types of students, the author intends to find the diverse functions of the two types of teaching methods on the improvement of the student's English proficiency, and give some suggestions on public school's English teaching from the advantages of the international school English teaching. This paper divides seventeen kinds of errors.The results shows that the quantity of the errors committed by the public school students are much more than the errors committed by the students receiving western international school teaching. With the help of the questionnaire and the observation of the teaching process, the author finds that there are such reasons causing the difference:the attitude of the students toward English studying; the students'focus of the study; the different study environment; the teacher's teaching method, etc. Among these factors, teaching context plays an important role on the influence of the students'second language acquisition. Among these factors, context, or environment, plays an important role in students'English learning process. This paper intends to be a little helpful to the public school English teaching.