A Study Of The Conjunction Usage And Its Error Analysis In English Writing Of Senior High School Students

English writing plays an important role in the English learning of high school students.As one of main outputs,English writing can not only help teachers to test students’ mastery of target language structure and sentence expressions,but also promote students to achieve the purpose of language acquisition through automated expressions.With the introduction of new curriculum standards and the reform of the new college entrance examination,new criteria and requirements have also been put forward for the teaching of English writing in senior high schools."General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition 2020 Revision)" emphasized the importance of discourse knowledge in English teaching,and proposed that teachers in discourse teaching should guide students to learn to identify conjunctions and use them to judge and express the logic of texts.Based on the importance of conjunctions in the English discourse teaching,this study aims to analyze the conjunction usage and errors in high school students with the attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the current situation of high school students’ conjunction usage in terms of type selection and word choice?(2)What are the common conjunction errors students make?(3)What are the factors that lead to these errors?To investigate the above questions,this study is under the framework of Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion Theory and Corder’s Error Analysis Theory.Besides,mid-term English compositions of 139 students,valid questionnaires of 128 students and interview records of ten students serve as research participants.All of these grade two students come from the same senior high school in Beijing.Through the combination qualitative and quantitative researches,including text analysis,questionnaire and interview,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Students generally have the awareness of using conjunctions to strengthen the cohesion of the article,but the usage of conjunctions presents the characteristics of monotony.To be specific,it is unevenly distributed for the type selection and word choices.For example,in narrative compositions,students often use additive,adversative and sequential types.Besides,"and","but","after" are the three most frequently used words.(2)The error rates of additive and adversative conjunctions belong to the highest ones.Furthermore,these students’ common conjunction errors focus on the following three aspects:misuse,underuse and abuse of conjunctions,among which misuse is the most serious part.(3)The factors that affect students’ usage of conjunctions come from the influence of negative transfer of native language;students’ attitudes towards English learning and English writing;disparity between Chinese and Western thinking;students’ learning habits and teachers’ teaching methods.Based on the above research results,the author puts forward such suggestions:increasing the explanation of the differences between Chinese and English expressions in teaching;providing more detailed and comprehensive courses and exercises on the usage of conjunctions;enriching the ways for students to obtain authentic language input;helping students to form good English learning habits;and cultivating students’ awareness of attaching importance to the usage of conjunctions and error analysis.