| English teaching mainly focuses on the teaching and training of four language skills. Namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among these four skills, Writing is accepted the hardest to master because learners must integrate Cognitive, memory and linguistic systems simultaneously when writing a composition. In addition to this, despite learning English for several years, students in junior high school are still poor in learning English, especially in their writing skills. When English teachers correct the students’translation exercises or compositions, it is common to see students commit all kinds of grammatical errors in their writing. This paper based on the hypothesis of error analysis, it aims at finding out how well the learners know a second language as well as how the learners study a foreign language, and integrate three procedures of error analysis which was proposed by Corder(1974), they are:Collection, description, explanation,(Corder,1981), in order to analyze and interpret the errors made in students’writing works.The participants are junior high school students of Grade Seven who are studying at an experimental school in Gong Ming, Shenzhen. The research is based on the error analysis theory and the instruments used for this research mainly include questionnaires, Composition and Interview in order to investigate the six most common errors in a corpus of102essays written by102participants. After analyzing the grammatical errors made by students in their writing English, the results show that six most common errors that the students committed were in Plural Form, Article, Verb Form, Tense, Preposition and Subject-verb Agreement. The findings of the study show that students were very much influenced by both the inter-lingual and intra-lingual interference of LI and inadequate understanding of grammatical rules of English. This study suggests that teachers need to pay more attention on the remedy teaching work and students’errors instead of wasting time on teaching grammar items which cause little or no problems to the students in their writing compositions. In addition, This paper will provide detailed information on students’errors and common difficulties in their language learning which in turn helps teachers to rectify students’errors and also improve the productiveness of their teaching.The present thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One provides the significance of the research, and structure of the thesis, including the current situations of English teaching in junior high school in China and the problems. Chapter Two focuses on the research of the contrastive analysis, aboard and home study on error analysis, the procedures of error analysis, followed by the sources of error in L2writing and transfer. Chapter Three provides detailed information on research methodology, including the purposes of the Study, the research instruments research design, survey procedures. Chapter Four deals with the analysis of data collected for this research, involving Analysis of questionnaire results, compositions and the interview results, gives a detailed analysis and interpretation of research data. Chapter Five summarizes the findings of the study, provides different conclusions, and shows suggestions and limitations. |
