Analysis Of Grammatical Errors In English Writing Of Junior High School Students In Trilingual Areas And Countermeasures

Listening,speaking,reading,viewing,and writing are the five basic skills for English learners,as emphasized in the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition).Writing,as the last of the five skills,best reflects the overall ability of English learners,and writing teaching has always been a weak part of English teaching.Therefore,it is vital to improving the quality of writing teaching and students’ English writing skills.In the autonomous minority regions of China,there is also a mix of ethnic languages and Chinese.English is learned as a third language for these students.In this context,the learning of English is bound to be affected to varying degrees,and these effects can take many forms in students’ writing.The study of English writing errors can provide information about the difficulties students encounter in learning English and can also reflect the teaching priorities side-by-side.Most previous studies on English writing errors have been conducted with students of upper grades,and only a few have been conducted with beginners.Among these studies,there are even fewer studies on English language teaching in bilingual areas.This study categorizes and analyzes the proportion of grammatical errors arising from trilingual learning and analyzes and summarizes the causes of errors.A middle school in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County,Yunnan Province,is taken as an example,and the teachers and students from the first grade as the study subject.Error analysis is conducted on students’ compositions,along with questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers.Finally,through all the information obtained,including composition texts,some insights were developed to improve the writing teaching level of teachers and the English writing ability of students in trilingual areas.This thesis aims to address the following three questions:Firstly,what categories of grammatical errors do Hani first-year students in trilingual Yunnan make in their English writing? What is the proportion of each category? Secondly,what are the reasons for Hani junior high school students’ grammatical errors in English writing in trilingual Yunnan? Thirdly,what are the behaviors of Hani junior high school students and teachers in the trilingual region of Yunnan towards grammatical errors in English writing? Moreover,what are the suggestions for improvement?Research has found that students in trilingual regions are influenced by both their native language and Chinese,with mainly negative transfer.The negative transfer of bilingualism to students’ English learning is more pronounced because of the large number of differences in the grammatical systems of Hani,Chinese,and English.The author categorizes student errors as either local or global errors.In terms of local errors,the most common error that students make is verb errors.In addition to this,the author also notes noun errors,pronoun errors,adjective and adverb errors,preposition errors,article errors,and numeral errors.In terms of global errors,the most frequent error made by students is incomplete sentence construction.Additionally,redundant sentence components,conjunction errors,and literal translation errors are relatively common.The author summarizes the causes of errors as interlingual errors,intralingual errors,and other factors.With regard to interlingual errors,most errors are due to negative transfer effects from Hani and Chinese.The author researches and summarizes interlingual errors based on the reasons for being influenced by Hani(the first language)and being influenced by Chinese(the second language).The following conclusions are drawn: From the influence of Hani,in terms of grammatical components,there are significant differences in verb “aspect”,noun categories,gender,and number,pronoun classifications,and adjective and adverb usage,as well as in grammatical structures such as verb-object structure,linking structure,and predicate complement structure,all of which differ greatly from English and thus cause negative transfer effects for students.From the influence of Chinese,in terms of grammatical components,differences in verb tense,countable and uncountable nouns,pronoun gender,and the usage of prepositions and articles exist,as well as in grammatical structures such as the structure of simple English sentences,the differences in English and Chinese passive voice,the differences in sentence structure between English and Chinese,and the differences in word order between English and Chinese,all of which cause negative transfer effects for students’ English learning.In terms of intralingual errors,factors such as overgeneralization,ignorance of rules,and incomplete application of rules all lead to grammar errors in student writing.In addition,factors such as underdeveloped regions,relatively weak educational resources,late English enlightenment for students,poor error correction habits,teachers’ classroom language and teaching preferences,and classroom error correction strategies can all have a negative impact on students’ writing.Finally,based on the above research and analysis of the reasons,the author offers insights from both teachers and students for English teaching and student learning in the region.On the one hand,it is essential to raise teachers’ attention to writing teaching,develop good writing and learning habits in students,increase the use of English in the classroom,establish a good English language sense and input environment,and lay a good foundation for beginning English learning.The other aspect is to make students more aware of their mistakes in writing and to develop a good sense and habit of error correction in response to their mistakes to improve their writing skills.