Analysis Of Errors In English Composition By Senior High School Students

Among the four basic skills of English study “Listening, Speaking,Reading and Writing", writing is the best way to measure one’s English ability,and it’s also of great importance in English teaching. There are concrete requirements in The English National Curriculum for Senior High School(2012) and The NMET(The National Matriculation English).In recent years, the research on the errors of Senior High School students’ English writing has been done by more and more researchers;however, it is still a weak point of most students in the English teaching practice in senior high schools. Besides, the research about the differences among students of different grades and writing levels are very limited. In order to find out the main errors in senior high school students’ English writing and to see if great difference do exist in the writings written by those students with different writing levels. The thesis was carried out by applying the theories of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage. The research materials were obtained from Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Affiliated High School. 300 compositions of students from Senior1 to Senior 3 were collected and 150 compositions were selected randomly as research samples firstly. Then all the errors were identified and categorized statistically into three kinds based on the previous research: the substance errors, the lexical errors, and the grammar errors.The findings are that grammar errors take the highest proportion with lexical errors and substance errors following behind, the result shows that the errors on grammar levels(especially in sentence order) and lexical(especially in confusion of sense relations) have been found most prominent in terms of frequency and proportion. Meanwhile, the author also found that lexical and grammar errors are growing gradually with the growing of grades from SeniorOne to Senior Three; there is evident distinction for students with different writing levels, fewer errors and mistakes could be found in the writings by students with high level, and more in those with low writing level, and there is evident negative transfer in their writings. Learners’ errors are made mainly because of language interference, which is both interlingual and intralingual.But in some cases, some errors are made due to the student’s carelessness. All these errors reflected the nature of the students’ interlanguage. In one word,the thesis made some basic research on writing errors of senior high school students, the author sincerely wish that it will be useful for the future teaching and studying, and more attention will be paid to such problems in the future teaching.