An Error Analysis Of English Writings By English Majors Of Different Grades

Second/Foreign language writing competence is the key of measuring second/foreign language proficiency;however,writing is rather complicated and difficult and has always been the hardest skill for language learners to acquire.Therefore,researchers abroad and at home have paid much attention to writing teaching.Making errors is inevitable in the process of learning a foreign or second language.Error Analysis(EA),a significant branch of Applied Linguistics,has both the theoretical value of helping scholars to get insights into language learning process and the practical meaning of implicating language teaching and learning.Analyzing errors in learners' writings can rationally reveal the problems and difficulties existing in their writing process.Although there have been studies on EA of Chinese EFL/ESL learners' writings abroad and at home,few analyzed errors in Chinese English majors' writings among different grades systematically.The present study applies quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to investigate errors in the writings by English majors of three different grades in a normal university in Jilin Province so as to get some insights into the development of learner writing at different stages of learning.It aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the main error types in the writings by English majors of the three grades respectively?(2)What are the similarities and differences among errors found in the writings by students of the three grades?(3)What are the possible causes of these errors?The present research collected 150 writing samples,50 from each grade.Corder's five-step error analysis method was adopted in the present study.After analyzing the writings,the author randomly chose five students in each grade to answer the questions of an interview and each interview lasted for about 20 minutes.Then the interview recordings were transcribed and analyzed.Analysis of learner writings and student interviews generated the following findings:(1)In general,students of all the three grades have committed many errors in their writings.In a total of 26724 words of the data collected,1763 errors are found,meaning that errors occur in every 15.16 words.Comparing the three grades,it is found that the error occurrence frequency from Grade One to Three changes in a descending order(8.03%,6.54%,5.11%).In terms of the error types,students in Grade One commit syntactic errors most(38.76% of all the errors),and the most frequent subcategory is run-on sentence.Whereas for students in Grade Two and Three,lexical errors rank first(over 40%),and the most frequent error subcategory is article error.(2)The similarities of the errors found among the three grades are:(1)Substantial errors take the least proportion among the four categories in all the three grades(about 10%)with slight changes from Grade One to Grade Three;(2)In each grade,misspelling,article errors and run-on sentences rank first in their own super-ordinate categories respectively and capitalization errors,illogical comparison and sequential errors rank last;(3)There are four types of changing trend of the 23 error subcategories in all grades,namely “up” type,“down” type,“up-down” type and “down-up” type.The differences are:(1)The developing tendencies of the four error categories' percentages among the three grades are distinguished from each other;(2)Among grades,the changing ranges of some subcategories,which have the same type of changing trend,are different from each other.(3)Apart from interlingual and intralingual transfer,possible causes related to practical EFL/ESL teaching and learning are found of four aspects,namely writing ability of learners,practice and efforts in English writing,related courses and teachers,and students' attitude.The present study has three implications: basic linguistic knowledge,regular practice and language input should be intensified;writing courses and teaching content need arranging properly;and it is necessary to cultivate writing motivation,interest and confidence of students.In spite of the efforts made,the present study is limited in two ways.It is not a longitudinal study though it tried to compare learner writings from three grades.The number of writings analyzed and the number of students interviewed are relatively small,making the results yet need to be verified by larger scale research.Hopefully,future studies can fill in the gap.