A Survey Of Students’ Spoken English Errors In Junior Middle School English Class

With the pace of globalization,the distance among countries is getting closer and closer.As a tool for communication,spoken English has been valued by more and more people.Moreover,student’s communicative skill is not only one of the goals of teaching but also a basic requirement of English core literacy.However,the spoken English level of most students is not so good as it is supposed to be.On the one hand,in non-English environments,students rarely get a chance to speak English,even in English classes,where they get a chance to speak a little English.On the other hands,learning English is a process of making errors and correcting errors.Error analysis is to study and analyze English learners’ errors which helps students to envisage their errors and turn errors into learning tools.Error analysis is also an valuable learning resource for English teachers who may explore the students’ learning process by error analysis and then design a specific teaching method for their students.Therefore,this study based on error analysis and interlanguage theory aims to address two questions as follows;（1）What are the types of errors in junior middle school students’ spoken English in class?（2）What are the causes of these errors in junior middle school students’ spoken English in class?Firstly,the study selected 12 regular lessons randomly from an experimental junior middle school in M City,then the audio recording material has been transcribed into written material.Secondly,students’ errors were picked out and analyzed in detail according to the five steps of error analysis.It can be found that on the language level these spoken English errors can be divided into ten types: verb phrase errors,noun phrase errors,pronoun errors,adjective phrase errors,adverb errors,preposition phrase errors,conjunction errors,word errors,collocation errors and syntax errors.In addition,these spoken English errors could be specified into 27 kinds further,and the errors of highest frequency are the agreement of verb phrase,infinite/non-infinite of verb phrase and structure deficiency of sentence.At the same time,the main causes of these spoken English errors were explored through interviews and questionnaires,which are interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer,communicative strategies,English teachers’ inducement and students’ subjectivity.This study hopes to provide some valuable materials for further research in this field as well as some suggestions for the spoken English teaching which help English teachers to improve their teaching and the junior middle school students can advance their learning.