Error Analysis And Causes Of Senior Three Students’ English Story Continuation Writing Task

Story continuation writing task(SCWT)was first applied to the college entrance examination in 2016 in the pilot provinces of comprehensive college entrance examination reform.It was not be applied to the college entrance examination in Hubei Province until 2021.As a language ability with a high demand for basic and comprehensive application skills,English writing is often easily ignored by teachers and students due to its complex and time-consuming teaching process.SCWT is far more difficult than traditional application writing because students need to read the article and figure out the writing purpose before they can write it.This task contains two obstacles.The first one is caused by reading: students may stray from the point because of the difficult reading text;the other is due to writing: expressions that are not accurate and fluent also get a low score.In the English college entrance examination in Hubei Province,SCWT has only been used for two years.English teachers and students in Hubei are relatively unfamiliar to this subject,and the research on it is far less than that on traditional application writing.According to the research of domestic scholars in recent years,it has been found that few teachers in high school English classrooms will set aside a full lesson for English writing,making it difficult for students to improve their writing skills.According to this author’s questionnaire survey,only 11.58% of students consider writing to be the most important skill in English learning,which indicates that writing is underappreciated in daily teaching.According to error analysis(EA)theory,language learners can strengthen their language skills by correcting their errors.In order to improve the teaching mode of SCWT in high school English classrooms and improve students’ SCWT abilities,this study collected 114 effective English SCWT samples from senior three students in the class of 2022 from a key high school in Hubei Province,based on the EA theory and text analysis method.This paper tries to answer the following questions: 1)What are the common types of errors in the SCWT of senior three students? And what about the characteristics of the distribution of these errors? 2)What are the reasons for the common errors in the SCWT of senior three students?A total of 895 errors were identified in the 114 collected sample compositions.Combined with previous studies related to EA,this study divided the identified errors into four major categories: technical errors,vocabulary errors,grammatical errors,and discourse errors.The technical errors include letter case errors,word spelling errors,punctuation errors,and letter writing errors.Vocabulary errors include vocabulary choice errors and vocabulary collocation errors.Grammatical errors include lexical errors and syntactic errors.Lexical errors include errors in the use of verbs,nouns,articles,pronouns,adjectives,and adverbs;syntactic errors include errors in the use of compound sentences,complex sentences,missing or redundant in sentence components,and Chinglish.Discourse errors consist of discourse coherence errors and discourse cohesion errors.Discourse coherence errors include inconsistency in narrative intention and inconsistency with the content of the first sentence;discourse cohesion errors include denotation errors,substitution and ellipsis errors,and conjunction errors.By classifying and counting students’ errors in SCWT,this study found that grammatical errors were the most frequent error that senior three students made in SCWT,with 527 occurrences,accounting for 58.8% of the total number of errors.This was followed by technical errors,which occurred 144 times,accounting for16.1% of the total number of errors.Then came the lexical errors,with 131 occurrences,accounting for 14.6% of the total number of errors.Discourse errors were the least frequent,with 93 occurrences,accounting for 10.5% of the total number of errors.In this study,114 questionnaires were distributed to the students whose writing samples were selected,and 95 valid questionnaires were collected.The interview subjects were six English teachers of senior three,all with postgraduate degrees,including two male teachers and four female teachers.The interview mainly includes the following five questions: 1)What do you think are the main problems students have in SCWT? 2)What is your specific process for teaching reading and writing? 3)Do you have any ideas that can improve students’ SCWT abilities? 4)What’s your opinion and how do you deal with students’ errors in SCWT? 5)Do you think that analyzing the errors in SCWT helps students learn English?Through analyzing the text contents as well as questionnaires and interviews,this study found that the causes of errors mainly include negative interlingual transfer,negative intralingual transfer,students’ lack of strong interest in English writing,students’ failure to develop good English writing habits,and teachers’ poor composition assessment methods.Finally,the teaching countermeasures to reduce students’ English SCWT errors are summarized according to the findings of this study,which mainly involve the following suggestions: cultivating students’ good writing habits and focusing on teaching basic knowledge;improving students’ confidence in SCWT and emphasizing the importance of English writing;continuing to optimize the teaching methods of SCWT and enriching the ways of SCWT assessment,and helping students establish a correct view of errors;establishing their own notebooks for error correction and making full use of them.