A Study Of Error Analysis In English Writing By High School Students In Rural Areas Of Gansu Province—Taking Y School In X County As An Exmple

With China becoming more and more powerful,students learn English not only by input learning,but also by writing in English,so that the world can see China in the form of text.The English curriculum standard for senior high school(2017 Edition)also makes new requirements for senior high school students’ written English.However,there are many mistakes in English writing of rural senior high school students in Gansu Province,which hinder the further development of English writing teaching.Therefore,this study will analyze the existing problems of English writing errors and analyze their causes.And put forward some strategies to improve the English writing errors of rural senior high school students in Gansu Province.Firstly,the sample school is Y school in X county of Gansu Province.And collected 330 effective compositions of Y school in September 2020.Then,ORC is used to convert these handwritten manuscripts into TXT,and Grammarly is used to extract25860 errors from these texts.Finally,after the second manual proofreading and identification by the researchers and the backbone teachers of Y school,21348 valid errors were obtained.According to James’ error classification criteria,these errors can be divided into four categories: formal errors,lexical errors,syntactic errors and genre errors.Then,by using SPSS to make an overall quantitative study of these errors,it is found that the degree of errors in English writing of senior high school students in Y school is as follows: syntactic structure errors(21.9%)> lexical use errors(18.2%)>genre errors(14.8%)> formal technology errors(10.8%);then the researchers analyze these four types of errors and find that: The errors of syntactic structure include tense error,form error and voice error;Lexical errors include noun error,pronoun error,article error,verb error,adverb error,adjective error,preposition error,conjunction error and numeral error;Genre errors include Chinglish,pragmatic errors,thematic errors and genre errors;while formal errors include spelling errors,punctuation errors and writing errors.Finally,the researchers use SPSS again to analyze these specific errors and find that: syntactic tense error(62.23%)> body error(32.8%)> voice error(4.8%);lexical verb error(24.1%)> preposition error(14.7%)> conjunction error(11.9%)> pronoun error(11.5%)> adverb error(10.9%)> Article error(8.9%)> adjective error.Errors of words(7.8%)> errors of nouns(7.1%)> errors of numerals(3.1%);errors of Chinglish(83.9%)> pragmatic failures(11.3%)> errors of themes(2.8%)> errors of genres(1.8%);errors of spelling(61.8%)> errors of punctuation(32.0%)> errors of writing(6.0%).The result of quantitative analysis is consistent with that of case analysis.Based on the results of 589 questionnaires,and the case study based on the literature,and the interview results of English teachers,students and educational managers in school y,the author finds that the factors leading to these errors are as follows:(1)Language factors include inter language transfer,intralingual transfer and Chinese-English thinking differences.(2)The individual factors of rural senior high school students include students’ subjective factors such as writing emotion anxiety,negative attitude towards the occurrence of errors,the process of correcting errors and passive behavior habits;the objective factors of students,such as lack of scientific correction methods and misleading learning environment;(3)Factors at the level of English teachers in rural high schools,including teachers’ subjective factors.For example,the attitude towards the evaluation of students’ English writing is slack,the teachers lack the spirit of active learning English writing error teaching improvement,and teachers’ objective factors such as lack of professional literacy,writing guidance and error correction are low.Finally,in order to improve the English writing errors,the researchers hereby put forward the following two teaching strategies: first,to improve the language errors of English writing with the "situation creation" strategy.It includes that teachers should create situations of self questioning,and guide students to actively perceive errors in English writing.Teachers should construct a situation that students can explore logically and cooperatively,and help students understand English writing errors more deeply.Teachers create the situation of English writing practice and promote students to improve their writing skills.Second,the "comparison switching" strategy is used to improve the errors caused by the differences between English and Chinese thinking.It includes making students discover the symbols and thinking characteristics between the two languages.Let the students compare the differences between the two languages.Let the students switch the thinking mode behind the two languages.