A Study Of The Errors In English Writing Of Senior High School Students

InEnglish teaching,teachers inevitably meet various kinds of writingerrors made by students.Although many studies have been made on the errors of Chinese students’ English writings,the study of writing errors made by senior high school students in Yiningare very insufficient.For English teachers,they can learn the common types oferrors and the distribution of errors by analyzing errors in students’ English writing,and they can know the possible sources of errors.Therefore,some beneficial suggestions may be given to teaching of English writing.Based onerror analysis theory and transfer theory,the author employed empirical method to analyzes the compositions writtenby students of senior two in No.1 High School in Yining,Xinjiang.By using the writing task and descriptive analysis as the instruments,the author aims to answer what errors may occur in students’ English writings in Senior School and to find out what the possible causes of the errors in students’ English writings in Senior School are?150 students were asked to finish a writing in the same time and of the same topic.Then 80 compositions were selected from 150 samples at random.According to James classification of errors,the author tried to classify the errors made by students of senior two in No.1 High School in Yining,Xinjiang.Then the author made a discussion of the sources of the errors.This study shows common types of errors in students’ English writing.They are substance errors,lexical errors,grammatical errors and discourse errors.Among them,the highest frequency oferror made by the subjects in their compositions is grammatical error,taking up 42.84 %.The least frequency oferror is discourse error,taking up 4.81%.In substance level,the highest frequency of errorsin students’ compositions is punctuation,taking up 51.24%.And spelling errors rank the last,taking up 22.25%.In the lexical level,the highest frequency of errors in students’ compositions is word choice,taking up 56%.In grammatical level,the highest frequency of errors is syntax,taking up 64.13%.The lowest frequency of errors at grammatical level is morphology,making up 35.87%.In discourse level,four types of discourse errors are showed.The most error at discourse level made by the subjectsis reference error,taking up roughly 50%.Lexical cohesion errors have the lowestfrequency,taking up 8 %.The possible causes of the errors made by senior high school students in Yining are mainly mother tongue transfer and target language interference.In addition,induced factors and lack of practice are also the possible causes of Senior High School students’ English writing errors.Specifically,mother tongue transfer contains linguistic transfer and thought pattern transfer.Target language interference contains over-generalization of language rules,ignorance of rule restrictions,incomplete application of rules and false concepts hypothesized.Finally,the author gives some implications.For English writing,teachers can employ useful andeffective methods such as teaching words in a certain context.Besides,they can train students’ awareness of thinking in English mode to avoid errors in English writing.For errorcorrection,the author suggests that face-to-face error correction can be tried.Besides,the teacher can show the writing to the whole class,and ask them to identify problems and try to correct the errors by themselves.Thus they will be more deeply impressed and less likely to commit the same errors later.