A Study On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Errors

The content reform of English language test in the new college entrance examination has prompted to pay attention to students’ reading and writing skills and improve their ability to use language comprehensively.In particular,the English language test has changed the format of the writing test section in the new round of Gaokao content reform,which raises the score of the writing section.At the same time,documents such as the Examination Syllabus(2019)issued by the Ministry of Education also set clear requirements for students’ writing skill.However,relevant studies have found that senior high students still have many deficiencies in English writing.Thus,this paper aims to investigate the overall situation of common errors in senior high students’ English writing and explores their errors as well as the causes for writing deficiencies based on the error analysis,in a hope of offering some suggestions for English writing teaching in the context of the new college entrance examination and new teaching material.In this study,text analysis and questionnaires are used as the main research instruments,with the supplement of interview.The research subjects are Grade One students from Ziyang Middle School in Sichuan Province.By collecting writing samples of practical letter writing and continuation task from two classes of senior high students’ midterm exams,the sample errors are marked through the procedures of error analysis and the types of errors are counted with the help of Ant Conc.And the questionnaire is developed from the questionnaire of Dai Weidong and Shuang Dingfang(1994)on error analysis and interlanguage research and the questionnaire from Li Yonglan’s thesis(2020).It includes four components: affective attitudes toward English writing,writing habits and strategies,attitudes toward errors,and response to teachers’ error correction.The three research questions addressed in this paper are:(1)what are the types of the errors in senior high school students’ English writing?(2)What are the characteristics of English writing errors of different English writing types?(3)What are the causes of errors in senior high students’ English writing?Through the study,the author has found out the following results:(1)the four main types of common errors of students are substance errors,lexical errors,syntactic errors and discourse errors.In the context of the new college entrance examination,it was found that the lexical errors are the highest and substance errors come next.Meanwhile,the third is the amount of syntactic errors.Discourse errors are slightly lower than them;(2)Continuation task and practical letters show different error characteristics in terms of the frequency of verb errors,macro-layout and micro cohesion and coherence errors;(3)linguistic causes,non-linguistic causes and other causes related to the examination are the causes of the discussed errors.Among them,errors caused by intralinguistic and interlinguistic transfer,are still the main causes of students’ poor English writing performance.According to the major research findings,some suggestions are given to teachers to better improve the current situation of students’ English writing in senior high school.In daily teaching,they should strengthen basic language training and consolidation,encourage to compare Chinese and English,develop students’ awareness of error correction,create continuation task training and instruction,as well as develop students’ writing habits and attitudes.However,since this paper has the disadvantages of a small sample size and a single research method,the author suggests that researchers can study the current situation of students’ English writing in the context of the new college entrance examination by increasing the number of research subjects and improving various research methods in the future.