A Survey Study On The Use Of English Mistake-collecting Notebook By High School Students

Mistakes are regarded as the most efficient way for students to make up loopholes and the most important resource for teachers’ lesson preparation. Therefore, setting up correct belief and adopting effective strategies are not only beneficial to the formation of systematic knowledge structure, but also to the improvement of learning results.This paper adopts questionnaire and interviews to investigate the use of English Mistake-collecting Notebook by high school students. The research questions addressed in this thesis are: 1) What is the general pattern of the use of English Mistaken-collecting Notebook by high school students? 2) Are there any differences in the use of English Mistaken-collecting Notebook between high achievers and low achievers? If yes, what are the differences? 3) Are there any correlations between the use of English Mistaken-collecting Notebook and students’ English proficiency? If yes, how do they correlate?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the study. The quantitative research mainly involves a self-designed questionnaire with the whole internal reliability of.714. The questionnaires were handed out to 278 high school students of Hanjiang Middle School and finally 236 were found valid. Then, the data is processed by SPSS 17.0. The qualitative research is a semi-structured interview with 10 students selected from those whose questionnaires are considered valid. The interview is carried out in Chinese and the whole process is tape-recorded. Afterwards, the results are transcribed into English and the transcriptions of the interview are carefully analyzed.Detailed analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research yields the following findings:Firstly, the present situation of using Mistake-collecting Notebook by high school students is satisfactory. In terms of belief, students are able to realize the importance of using mistake-collecting notebook and the item of Mistakes reflecting incompetent in learning and resulting in frustration is the most supported. In terms of behavior, Not collecting mistakes because of the lack of time comes first leading to avoid using mistake-collecting notebook, but Collecting mistakes to find out right ways of correcting mistakes and Collecting mistakes to deepen the understanding of knowledge motivate students to do it. In light of strategy, Collecting mistakes on a notebook are the most supported, while Collecting mistakes directly on the paper and Classifying mistakes according to typicality or importance are the least preferred by students.Secondly, the significant difference exists in the category of strategy (.p=.00) between high achievers and low achievers, but the difference are not significant in the categories of belief and behavior. For specific items in behavior, Not collecting mistakes for the same exercises will never appear and Collecting mistakes to deepen the understanding of knowledge show significant difference between two groups. In strategy category, high achievers report adopting four strategies(Binding papers regularly to know mistakes conveniently, Classifying mistakes according to types or grammar, Collecting mistakes independently before teachers’explanation or discussion with classmates and Doing same exercises to consolidate the learning) much more frequently than low achievers (p<.05).Thirdly, the category of strategy is positively correlated with students’English proficiency at the.01 level, while no significant correlation existing in belief and behavior categories. Besides, as for some specific items, Binding papers regularly to know mistakes conveniently, Classifying mistakes according to types or grammar, Collecting mistakes independently before teachers’explanation or discussion with classmates and Doing same exercises to consolidate the learning are positively related to students proficiency, while the item of Not collecting mistakes for the same exercises will never appear is negatively related.With regard to the findings, this paper makes some pedagogical implications. Teachers should inspire students’awareness of using Mistake-collecting Notebook, provide students some specific strategies and pay more attention to low achievers. And students should take more effective strategies to improve learning proficiency.