A Systemic Analysis Of Errors In Ninth-grade Students’ EFL Writing

The teaching of EFL writing is now occupying an increasingly important position inninth grade junior high school EFL education. English teachers, however, often fail to obtain asystemic or complete and precise understanding of the various errors occurring in thestudents’ writing. With the enhancement of the status of junior high school EFL writinginstruction, the study of it has also made much progress in the recent years. Up to now,however, few case studies or systemic investigations have been conducted regarding theerrors in junior high school learners’ EFL writing. Oriented to the present situation andproblems of the practice and research of junior high school EFL writing teaching, under theguidance of systemic thinking salient in systems sciences, on the basis of relevant conceptsand theories of second language acquisition research, and through the use of the error analysisprocedure proposed by Stephen Pit Corder and others, this thesis attempts to conduct asystemic analysis of the errors in the ninth-grade junior high school students’ EFL writing soas to systemically understand their nature and characteristics, especially the types and causesof the errors, and lay a solid foundation for developing a methodology of systematicallytreating errors or preventing the occurrence of errors through well-informed instruction.Firstly, the present study collects as a sample of learner language200EFL compositionswritten by100hundred ninth grade students in Yantai No.2Middle School in two writingassignments, systemically identifies the errors and mistakes occurring in them (distinguishingerrors from mistakes), and classifies the errors according to linguistic parameters mainly intogrammatical, lexical and textual errors. Then, this study explores the causes of the identifiedand classified errors from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, comparative-linguistic, andlinguistic perspectives, and evaluates the seriousness of the errors. Finally, the study proposessome strategies to treat, predict or prevent errors. This study finds that (1) there exist manyerrors and mistakes in the EFL writing of ninth grade junior high school learners, of whichgrammatical errors constitute the largest proportion, and lexical errors and textual errorsconstitute a smaller proportion,(2) the causes of errors include sociolinguistic,psycholinguistic, comparative-linguistic, and linguistic sources, among which first language transfer constitutes the most important one, and (3) there are both global errors and localerrors. The study suggests that EFL teachers should be careful in deciding what errors need becorrected and should adopt appropriate measures in their teaching of EFL writing to treat,predict or prevent errors.The findings of this study can hopefully help to solve the problem of the teachers’ partialunderstanding of the nature and features of errors in their students’ English writing teaching,and it thus may have an important value to junior high school EFL teaching practice. Thisstudy may also help to solve the problem of lacking systemic case studies of learner errors injunior high school EFL research and is thus of much academic or theoretical significance.