An Error Analysis Of High-level And Low-level Students’ English Writing

In China, college freshmen’s English level varies considerably, which has become a challenge to English teaching.In recent years, level-based English teaching model is increasingly adopted in comprehensive universities as an effective solution to the problem. To study the differences in students’ English learning of different levels can help teachers improve their teaching accordingly. It is of great significance for both teachers and students.An error analysis on learners’ writing will cast new light on the development of the learners’ internal linguistic system. So the thesis chooses freshmen2012from LNTU as subjects and conducts error an analysis research on40random English writing samples from the high-level students and another40from the low-level students respectively. At first, the thesis identified the errors in the writing samples and classified them into four types. Then, with EXCEL and SPSS statistic software as tools, the study found that the differences between the writing errors of two levels are as follows:Firstly, the number of errors of high-level students is much smaller than that of high-level students in all the four types. Secondly, lexical errors are the most frequent errors in the high-level students’ writing, while substance errors are the most frequent errors in the low-level students’ writing. Thirdly, the correlation between lexical errors and grammar errors is significant both in high-level students’ writing and low-level students’ writing. Furthermore, the thesis presents some teaching strategies on the basis of the findings.