Error Analysis In Junior High School Students’ English Writing And Its Pedagogical Implications

In English teaching,listening,speaking,reading and writing are the four basic skills that students should master,among which English writing plays an indispensable role.It can reflect the students’ comprehensive ability of language use.However,mistakes such as improper use of words,stacking of words,extensive use of simple sentence,Chinglish,etc are common in Chinese students’ compositions.Through the collation and analysis of the relevant literature,it is found that the empirical research on English writing errors in China is rarely focused on junior high school students,but more on college students or senior high school students.As far as the only researches on the English writing errors of junior high school students are concerned,most of them are the overall description of the English writing errors of junior high school students.However,there is little concern about the difference of errors among English learners at different levels.In addition,many studies only analyze the causes of writing errors on the basis of language results,but ignore the learners’ psychological course when making errors.Thus,these two aspects are what this article tries to break through.On the basis of error analysis theory,contrastive analysis theory and interlanguage theory,this study takes the students of Class 1 and Class 2 of Grade 9 of Lanzhou No.45 Middle School in Gansu province as the research subjects,and takes the English writing test and interviews as the research tools.It attempts to solve three questions below: 1.What are the main types of errors in junior high school students’ English composition? 2.What is the distribution of various types of errors in English writing for students with different writing levels? Is there any difference? 3.What are the main reasons for junior high school students’ English writing errors?In the course of the study,the author divides the 881 errors in 100 student composition samples into three categories,namely,substance,vocabulary and grammar errors.First of all,it is about the overall descriptive analysis of errors.Secondly,the author tests the differences in the distribution of each kind of errors in the writing of students with different English proficiency by one-way ANOVA to see whether the differences in the distribution of each kind of errors among students with different levels of English are significant.Finally,through interviews and combining with writing samples,this paper analyzes the main causes of students’ writing errors and draws the following conclusions:First,it is found that junior high school students make three kinds of errors in English writing:substance errors,lexical errors and grammatical errors.Grammatical errors are most likely to be committed,followed by substance and lexical errors.Second,in general,there is an inverse relationship between thenumber of errors and students’ English proficiency.Specifically,for grammatical errors,there are significant differences between groups.For substance errors and lexical errors,there are significant differences between low-score group and the other two groups of students.The difference between high-score group and middle-score group students is not obvious.Thirdly,through the analysis of students’ writing samples and interviews,it is found that the main causes of English writing errors in junior high school students are interlingual and intralingual transfer,lack of training,lack of good writing habits,induced factors and emotional factors.Finally,some teaching suggestions are put forward,hoping to be helpful to the future teaching.