An Investigation Of Senior High School Students’ Error Management In English Learning

New Curriculum Standards clearly points out that one of the overall goals of seniorhigh school English curriculum is to make students form effective English learning strategies.Learning strategies are prerequisites for students to improve their learning efficiency anddevelop their competence of autonomous learning. Errors reflect difficulties and problemsthat students encounter in the process of learning. It is an effective feedback on students’present learning situation and a valuable learning resource. If students are able to apply errormanagement strategies correctly and effectively, they will make great progress in learning.However, senior high school students are overloaded with learning tasks, so they do not haveenough time and energy to manage errors, which causes many problems in errormanagement.This study aims at exploring senior high school students’ English error managementstatus, identifying the correlation between English learning performance and errormanagement level, finding out the existing problems, exploring ways to solve these problems,and giving both teachers and students some reasonable suggestions respectively, so as toinstruct students to apply error management strategies correctly and help students improvetheir learning effectiveness. Therefore, after studying the literature and referring to “ErrorManagement Scale of Junior Middle School Students” designed by Professor Liu Rude and“A Questionnaire of Senior High School Students’ Error Management in MathematicsLearning” designed by Zhou Wan, and taking senior high school students’ present learningsituation into consideration, the author designed the interview questions. Then10students ofeach grade in Xiangfen Senior High School were selected to carry out the interview. To get ageneral idea of senior high school students’ present situation of English error management,then, the author designed “A Questionnaire of Senior High School Students’ Error Management in English Learning” on the basis of the interview results and the formerquestionnaires. The questionnaire contains two parts. The first part is about senior highschool students’ individual English error management status, and the second part is aboutsenior high school teachers’ guidance on students’ error management strategies. After that,the author selected180students from the three grades to conduct the questionnaire surveyfrom three aspects: error management attitudes and values; error management strategies andbehaviors; senior high school teachers’guidance on students’error management strategies.In this thesis, the author applied the statistical software, SPSS, to process and analyzethe collected data, and drew the following conclusions:1. Senior high school students have positive attitude towards errors and errormanagement, and they can realize the value of errors and error management. Most studentsare willing to manage errors in their study but they are lack of systematic and advanced errormanagement strategies.2. Students in different grades have significant differences in error management.Students in grade two are superior to those in grade one and grade three in the overall level oferror management and the two dimensions: error management attitudes and values; errormanagement strategies and behaviors. And students in grade three do not behave so well asthose in grade one.3. Students of different genders have significant differences in error management.Females behave better than males in the overall level of error management and the twodimensions: error management attitudes and values; error management strategies andbehaviors.4. There is a significant positive correlation between senior high school students’ errormanagement level and English learning performance.5. Most of English teachers have realized the importance of error management and theyhave taught students some simple error management strategies, but they do not give studentsenough guidance on advanced strategies.At last, the author gives both English teachers and students suggestions, according tothe result of questionnaire survey, on error management as follows:1. Teachers should explain meaning and significance of error management;demonstrate procedures of error management; give hierarchical guidance and reinforcementon error management; supervise procedures of error management.2. Students should perfect error management procedures: collection and archiving of errors; correction of errors; sharing of errors and application of errors.