A Corpus-based Study Of Errors In English Writing Of Senior High School Students

English writing plays an important role in English language learning and it reflects students’ ability of comprehensive language application.The reduction of English writing errors in high school can help improve English writing performance and grades.Nowadays,English writing achievements have been included in the New Curriculum Standards for High School English(2020 Revision).Moreover,English writing plays an essential part in the college entrance examination paper.But,improving English writing has been a difficult task so it is very important and necessary to study English writing errors.On the basis of Error Analysis theory,this study aims at classifying the types of English writing errors of senior high school students and then finds out the features of error distribution among students with different English achievements.At last,it attempts to find out the reasons for such errors so as to give some suggestions for both English writing teaching and learning in the future.This study aims to solve the following questions:(1)What are the types of errors in English writing for senior high students?(2)What are the distribution features of errors among students with different English achievements?(3)What are the causes for errors in English writing of senior high students?This study applies the text analysis method,the questionnaire and interview to collect data on the writings of senior two students of a high school in Chengdu.This study’s paradigm is both quantitative and qualitative so these data will be processed by using statistical approach and analyzed in a way of description as well.The author builds a small corpus with the help of Ant Conc 4.1.0 and marks English writing errors in it and then checks the errors again with the help of a writing correction website.Finally,after a series of retrievals,this software helps to count the distribution and proportion of each error type in students’ writing samples.The results show that there are three types of writing errors,namely,vocabulary errors,grammar errors and discourse errors.Grammar errors account for the largest proportion while the discourse errors occur in the least frequency.Besides,there are some differences between high and low achievers in their writing errors.The high-achievers make more vocabulary errors while the low-achievers make more grammar errors and discourse errors.In addition,this research figures out main causes of writing errors contain interlingual factors,intralingual factors and some other factors.According to the results of this study,the author makes the following pedagogical suggestions: 1.Understand the differences between Chinese and English languages and train students’ English thinking ability;2.Let students read authentic language materials and focus on discourse learning;3.Stimulate students’ interests in writing and cultivate their writing habits;4.Enhance the teaching of writing strategies and skills and enrich the forms of writing evaluation.