A Systemic Analysis Of Errors In The Written Discourse Of First Year Senior High School EFL Learners

In China's high school EFL teaching,it is necessary for teachers to regularly analyze and treat students' errors in their written EFL discourse.Due to the complexity of errors and the vague or partial perspectives for viewing them,high school EFL teachers often suffer from a blurred and incomplete view of their students' errors in EFL writing,failing to precisely identify,describe,explain and evaluate errors,and consequently not knowing how to systematically treat or prevent them.At the same time,in the area of error analysis in general and high school EFL error research,scholars have been fruitfully exploring errors in students' writing using new views,theories,methods and procedures.Studies up to now,however,are often inadequate in number and in quality,largely neglecting the systemic analysis of high school EFL learners' errors,resulting in the vague and partial understanding of the nature and features of such errors.It is therefore urgent to conduct more systemic studies of errors in high school students' EFL written discourse.Oriented to the above-mentioned problems in the teachers' analysis and treatment of errors in high school EFL writing and in the EFL researchers' studies of errors in general and errors in high school EFL writing,the present study attempts to systemically analyze the errors in the written discourse of 100 first grade high school students from a certain middle school in China in the light of systemic thinking,on the basis of behaviorist,mentalist,and constructive theories of language learning,through the method of qualitative case analysis and the procedure of error analysis advanced by Stephen Pit Corder and others,in order to systemically understand the nature and features,categories and causes of high school students' errors in their EFL writing and thereby lay a solid foundation for treating and preventing errors.Results generated from the study demonstrate(1)that errors in high school students' EFL written discourse are in nature discourse fragments deviating from target-language English norms in form,meaning,and/or function;(2)that these errors belong variously to pragmatic,semantic,textual,syntactic,lexical,orthographic and punctuation deviations,especially to syntactic and lexical errors;(3)that these errors are variously caused by social cultural,psychological,cognitive,and linguistic factors,and more by intra-lingual interference than by inter-lingual interference(first language transfer),and(4)that some errors are global,causing global misunderstanding,while others are local,only affecting the accuracy of written discourse.This study is hopefully meaningful both practically and academically.Practically,its findings may help to solve the problem of high school EFL teachers' vague and partial understanding of the nature and features of errors in their students' writing and may therefore facilitate their error treatment and prevention.Academically,this study may help to solve the problem of inadequate study of errors in high school students' EFL writing both in quantity and in quality,especially the problem of inadequate guidelines and methods in relevant research.