An Error Analysis Of Vocational School Students’ English Writing

In the course of teaching, language teachers inevitably come across various writing errors made by students. Though much research has been done on the errors in EFL learners’ writings, studies on the errors made by vocational school students are still insufficient in Chinese ESL context. This thesis, with Error Analysis (EA), Contrastive Analysis (CA), and Interlanguage (IL) as its theoretical guidance, tries to explore the common error characteristics and causes in vocational school students’ writings.50 compositions are collected from the Year One English majors in Shaoxing Secondary Vocational School as the most important part of the research data, which were written in the same period of time under the same content requirement included in the English final test last term.In order to improve the study reliability, two experienced English-speaking EFL teachers from America and Australia are invited to help grade the compositions, detect, analyze, correct and classify errors in the compositions. Five students are interviewed for more reasonable data analysis. At the same time, thinking aloud reports are done by the students during the test time, which act as their introspection for the teachers to discover what is going on in their mind during writing.The analysis shows that there are 550 errors in all the students’50 compositions, linguistically consisting of 303 text errors,134 discourse errors and 113 substance errors, respectively taking up 55%,24% and 21% of the total number of errors. In the surface structure dimension, errors are made up of 298 misselections,170 overinclusion,63 omissions and the absolutely least 19 misorders, respectively taking up 54%,31%,11.5% and 3.5% of all the errors. Misselection errors play the biggest part in the vocational school students’English writing:Misselection between commas & periods, upper & lower cases, and punctuations & conjunctions in between clauses. Misselection also happens among verb tenses, three verbal forms (infinitives, participles and gerunds), as well as similar words either in word meaning or in word structure.Besides, it turns out that the students’English writings embody obvious Chinese interference by the word-for-word translation.Based on the data analysis, this study suggests that EFL teaching should include more authentic English textbooks or other materials for language input, and more peer feedbacks on their English writings. Also, grammar instruction should be meaning-based and tied to English input. Besides, English teachers should pursue their professional development to decrease students’induced errors.Hopefully, the study will be of some help to EFL teaching and learning.