A Corpus-based Error Analysis In High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is among the most representative comprehensive ability to use language for students,which is a key element and difficult part in high school English teaching.However,nowadays,the state of English writing is overwhelmingly negative: Errors occur repeatedly and students get too low scores,which has been a major problem for high school students.However,errors are unavoidable in the course of English learning.Moreover,it is of great significance to analyze the writing errors.And the analysis of them in a scientific way can not only help students consciously to reduce or avoid errors,but also bring about implications for English writing teaching.The thesis makes a thorough inquiry into the questions: 1.What are the common types of errors in high school students’ English writing? 2.What are the characteristics of writing errors in different grades? 3.What are the main causes for the common errors in the writing?To solve these questions,the thesis selects the students from Changqing No.1High School as research subjects,and adopts the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis to analyze students’ writing errors to find out the root causes and propose some strategies to develop the writing teaching,on the basis of text corpus,error analysis theory and interlanguage theory,with the help of error retrieval software and questionnaire.As for the midterm exam,300 compositions are collected to analyze from Grade10 to Grade 12 of Changqing No.1 High School,100 each grade.The essay discusses the causes for these errors by setting up the writing text corpus and using the questionnaire.One of the purposes is to help teachers get to strategies and methods to improve teachers’ English teaching and students’ writing ability.After the analysis of writing errors,here are the results: 1.High school students’ English writing errors mainly focus on five categories,that is,the lexical,words,verb phrases,noun phrases and syntax.2.There are respective characteristics in different grades.Writing errors are decreasing as the learners’ writing capability increases.There are certain similarities on writing errors among different grades.However,differences also exist and the errors tend to be more and more stable with grade growth.3.There are two main causes for errors from interlingual aspect andintralingual aspect.One is the negative transfer of mother tongue in the course of English learning.The other is the students’ inadequate knowledge of the target language,such as overgeneralization,neglect of rule limitations,incomplete application of rules and false concept hypothesis.Here are the ways to decrease or avoid errors: First,English teaching should develop students’ confidence about writing,emphasize English basic knowledge and cultivate students’ basic abilities.Next,teachers should improve their own theoretic knowledge and teaching skills and develop students’ various error correction ability.Finally,students ought to emphasize accumulation,cultivate writing skills and write more and practice more.Meanwhile,by looking up errors in the corpus and comparing their English writing,students can be more aware of the deficeincies in their wriiting,and master the correct methods to improve their wriitng level.This essay further verifies that the writing text corpus and error analysis can be helpful to understand students’ errors in English writing and explore the root causes of errors,and it also contributes to predict the errors types that students may encounter in the future writing to find effective ways to improve students’ writing competence.