Syntactic Error Analysis on the Writing of Senior Students.doc

高中生英语写作中的句子错误分析syntactic error analysis on the writing of senior students abstract: virtually every student makes errors in one way or another. errors seem to be inevitable no matter what painstaking efforts we make in both learning and teaching aspects. when writing, students will repeat the same error without realization. in order to save this problem and improve students writing level, this study just focuses on the errors made in students compositions, using theories on error analysis to examine the errors and try to find the causes of the errors. 120 senior students compositions are collected and the errors are counted so as to make it possible to observe the distribution and proportion of different kinds of errors. the study also analysis possible causes of errors in five aspects. the study shows the main reason that cause errors in senior students writing are inter-lingual and intra-lingual errors. following the analysis and discussion, relevant error collection methods and some pedagogical suggestions are also put forward.key words: syntactic error analysis; english writing; senior students; inter-lingual error; intra-lingual error高中生英语写作中的句子错误分析【摘要】英语教师在教学过程中不可避免的会遇到学生在写作中出现的各种各样的语言错误，而无论教师和学生如何努力，错误似乎总是难以避免。而在写作中，学生自身无法察觉这些错误，进而总是犯着同样的错误。为了解决这一问题从而提高学生的写作水平，本论文以高中生英语写作中的句子错误作为切入点，利用错误分析理论分析这些错误并试图找出这些错误的产生原因。 本文抽取了天水四中高二学生的120篇作文进行采样分析，从而分析了各种句子错误的分布及每种错误所占的比例，并对错误产生的原因加以讨论。 研究结果表明，语际错误，语内错误是导致学生出错的主要原因。 本文还将基于这些分析，针对目前的高中英语写作教学现状，提出了一些英语作文的教学建议和措施。【关键词】句子错误分析；高中生；英语写作；语际错误； 语内错误 contentsi. introduction .1ii. literature review.22.1theories of errors analysis.22.2 the previous research on the error analysis of writing.4iii. study.53.1 subjects.63.2 content.63.3 research procedure63.4 data analysis and error description7iv. causes of errors .194.1 inter-lingual errors .194.2 intra-lingual errors.224.3 induced factors.234.4 lack of practice.23.strategies of helping writing235.1 raising students motivation to write.23 5.2 encourage students to read extensively.245.3 improving the way of lexical teaching.24 5.4 combining grammatical with writing teaching.245.5 flexible and efficient feedback.245.6 make students do some reciting.25.conclusion.25 references.27acknowledgements.2931i. introductionwith the development of frequent communication between different countries, english, as an international language, plays a role of medium. especially english writing seems to become more and more important. when we introduce our advanced technology and experience to other countries, we need people who have an ability to write in english; when we export our industrial, agricultural and other products, we need people to give english interpretation of their usages and functions in details; when scientists publish a paper in an international journal, they need to prepare an english version. so the use of english writing is very wide. besides, among the four basic skills of english, writing is a more complicated one. writing ability can reflect ones comprehensive skills in thinking, understanding, and using language. english writing is not only the target of english study, but also is helpful to consolidate english knowledge constantly. it can make us use and master english in high level. writing can even pave the way for the full development of english skills. whats more, the english teaching syllabus in middle schools requires students to have primary ability to communicate in written or spoken english. according to the syllabus, students should express ideas clearly without serious grammar errors in their writing. and, now, english writing is an important content of the college entrance examinations. it also requires students to have rich language knowledge and excellent expressing ability. however, in senior school, writing is the weakest part in the english teaching and learning, the writing level of the senior students is far away from the standard f the syllabus. for teachers, they only teach the specific usage of an isolated word, give less time to specially instruct students to write english compositions; for students, they usually dont know what to write and how to write, so they take writing for granted, making so many mistakes, and avoiding writing. thus, writing just become a task, students only try to complete it without regarding it as a skill; whats worse, the teachers always fail to realize the deep sources of students making errors in writing. this paper attempts to analyze the types of syntactic errors and their possible causes, and then help teachers think about the problem with the theory of error analysis and analyze errors in linguistics, thus teachers can advance some ways to deal with students errors in their english writing. so, the study focuses on the following purposes:(1) to help teachers master the concrete studying level of students english. on one hand, errors can provide information. finding errors can help teachers know defects in teaching methods and plans, they can adjust teaching schedule according to the students. on the other hand, by errors analysis, teachers can learn types and causes of errors. it is helpful to find out available strategies of error correction and have remedial teaching to improve learning results of students.(2) to help students reduce errors in their writing. writing mainly involves words and grammar, of which words and sentences are basic material for writing. students usually make errors in spelling and usage of words. of course, more errors in high level such as grammar and sentence. for senior students, error analysis could motivate them to find errors and correct them. the more they correct errors, the fewer errors they make. then students become more confident in english writing and gradually get interested in learning english.ii. literature review2.1 theories of error analysis 2.1.1 the definition of error r.ellis defined error as “a deviation from the norms of the target language” (1994:51). but it is difficult to decide which should serve as the norm, the standard written dialect or the standard spoken variety?c.james said a language is an unsuccessful bit of language.”(1998:1) and “error cannot be self-corrected until further relevant input (implicit or explicit) has been provided and converted into intake by the learner” (1998:83). in other words, errors require further relevant learning to take place before they can be self-corrected.for some linguists, intentionality plays a decisive role in this definition: an error arises only when there was no intention to commit one. that is, an error is an instance of language that is unintentionally deviant and is not self-corrigible by its author.for the scope of the study in this thesis, error is defined as “a deviation from the standard written forms of the target language.”2.1.2 error analysiserror analysis is the study and analysis of the errors made by second and foreign language learners. it is carried out in order to find out how well someone knows a language and obtains information on common difficulties in language learning, so as to provide an aid in teaching or in the preparation of teaching materials(richard: 1985). error analysis has been intentionally used for three different purposes. firstly, in second language (l2) acquisition studies where the learners inter-lingual transfer ability is examined; secondly, as evidence cross-linguistic influence from the first language (l1) on the l2; and finally as an approach used for pedagogical reasons, to point out problematic areas to be focused on in teaching. that is, traditional error analysis aimed to be pedagogic, for errors provided information used to sequence items for teaching or to devise errors (ellis, 1985).according to s.p.corder (1971), error analysis is a type of bilingual comparison between learners interlanguage and the target language. it is a methodology of describing l2 learners errors. based on the definitions, error analysis in the study is the comparison between students interlanguage and the standard english form, and their errors will be identified, described, explained, and evaluated. corder (1971:149-159) provided a model to identify errors. he pointed; mistakes are non-systematic and self-corrigible while errors are systematic and not self-corrigible. he argued that error analysis should only investigate errors, not mistakes. corder also distinguished three types of errors according to their systemization:()pre-systematic errors occur the learner is unaware of existence of a particular rule in the target language. these are random.() systematic errors occur when the learner has discovered a rule but it is a wrong one.() post-systematic errors occur when the learner knows the correct target language rule but uses it inconsistently.there are generally two strategies to identify the types of descriptive taxonomies of errors. one is based on linguistic categories, each general category is then broken into further levels of subcategories; another is the surface strategy taxonomy of errors established according to practical problems and errors are filed respectively. this method is convenient and is adopted in this study. 2.2 the previous research on the error analysis of writingfor a long time, students english writing has been an issue that attracts the attention of many foreign and chinese english teachers. analyses have been done at different linguistics levels, in different approaches, and from various perspectives.2.2.1 research abroadlee (1957) reports on an analysis of some 2,000 errors in the written work of czechoslovakian learners, he argued that such an analysis put the teacher in a better position to decide how teaching time should be spent.grauberg (1971) analyzed the errors of a group of advanced learners of german with mt english and commented on “the preponderance of lexical errors”,102 out of 193(53%) recorded errors were lexical. meara (1984) later confirmed that lexical errors outnumbered other types by three or four to one.calvez”s (2000) detailed study of students” errors, based on an analysis of 600 compositions gathered over four years derived well-documented examples of each type. it established that the main type of error by far was in vocabulary, followed by prepositions.j.b. heaton and n.d.turton (1987) based on a sample of errors taken from cambridge first certificate in english answer papers, published the longman dictionary of common errors. it is an alphabetically ordered listing of 1,700 errors in english most common made by foreign learners.2.2.2 research in china many chinese teachers also focus their attention on errors of writing and try to find the causes.he anping (2001) summarized the causes of chinese middle school students spelling mistakes in his writing. he used mess (middle school english education database) as the tool to analyze the errors. he found more than half of the spelling mistakes in middle school students writings are related to the mistakes in their pronunciations, and he also found these pronunciation problems mainly involve vowels.du jinbang (2001) collected and analyzed the students errors in english writing. he reached the conclusion that the most frequent occurring errors were grammatical errors followed by chinese english, and discourse errors came in third.liang ping (2002) analyzed senior students writing, she noted that the students often choose to use simple words and their writings are lacking of serious structures. the students failed to recognize the parts of speech of the words. they usually make sentences without thinking about electing the proper words, what they count most are the meaning.lian shuneng (2003) pointed out that the influence of mother tongue can be reflected clearly in senior students writing. she concluded that the lower a students proficiency was when learning a foreign language, the more unidiomatic sentences there were in his writing. she also explained the reasons for this as “until one has a god command of foreign language, ones writing is bound to be affected by ones native language; until one can think in english, ones ideas will often be expressed in word for word renderings of chinese into english.”this study will base on these theories, just choose to analyze the syntactic errors in the compositions of senior students of no.4 middle school in tianshui, try to find the possible sources of the errors so that can help the teachers adjust the teaching schedule to the practical problems and improve students english writing level.iii. study 3.1 subjectsone hundred and twenty senior students compositions are studied in this thesis. the students are from two classes of senior two in tianshui no.4 middle school. these compositions are selected from their examination papers and usual homework.3.2 content among the collected 120compositions, there are 60 examination writings which require students write it with80-120 words on the given title “the difference of winter /summer activities between chinese and american students” in 30 minutes. the other 60 compositions are their usual homework with free titles. 3.3 research procedure in this study, the syntactic errors of the compositions samples will be selected and each kind of small error proportion of the entire syntactic errors will be calculated. the syntactic errors collected are classified into three categories: (1) local errors (those affect single elements in a sentence, for example, errors in morphology or grammatical factors); (2) global errors (those affect overall sentence examples are wrong word order, missing or wrongly placed connectors, and syntactic overgeneralizations); (3) other types of errors (spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc). these three types of errors are further subdivided as follows in the need of analysis:local errors:errors in the use of verbserrors in the use of nouns errors in the of articles errors in the use of prepositions errors in the use of adjectives errors in the use of adverbserrors in the use of pronouns errors in the use of conjunctionsglobal errors errors in incomplete sentenceserrors in sentence order disagreementambiguous expression of meaning run-on sentenceschinese english redundancyerrors in tense errors in voice errors in other construction other types of errors examined including;errors in spelling errors in punctuation errors in capitalization3.4 data analysis and error descriptionin this process, each paper is first read to find out the whole syntactic errors. as a result, the global errors are the first and then local errors are identified. then a count of each global category and local word type is made. the percentage of errors in each category is calculated as follows:table1:types of errorsfrequencylocal errors354global errors531other types of errors10083.4.1 local errorsthe number of words of each category and the number of each kind of errors are collected, and then the percentage of errors in each category are calculated and presented in the following table:table2: local errorsparts of speechnumber of wordsnumber of errors of errorsnouns1764864.9verbs11871038.6articles1006383.8prepositions841283.3adjectives672324.7adverbs423102.4pronouns754324.2conjunctions42781.9from the table above, we can draw a conclusion that the errors of verbs are the highest, then the errors of nouns, adjectives and pronouns.3.4.1.1 errors in verb usagetable3:types of errorsfrequencywrong verb form(finite/non-finite)38incorrect verb15number16modal verb27other type7these verb errors result from many causes. inflections of verbs play an important role in english sentence because the subject-verb concord is the essential structure in english. chinese verbs have no inflections and it is no surprise that verbs can not be distinguished by sheer forms. the statistic of the study reveals that the senior students are poor at inflections. they accustomed to their mother tongue, and do not have the consciousness of english inflections, so painstaking efforts should be made to avoid this kind of errors and improve their performance in english. some serious verb error example will be presented respectively in the following:errors in finite/non-finite verb:non-finite verb is a complicated grammatical item. it includes infinitive, gerund, present participle and participle. each english sentence involves one finite verb and any other verbs should be changed into non-finite ones if there are. however, chinese has no such verb changes. it poses a brand-new concept and sounds strange to the students. for example:(1) it is good for us to growed.(2) students enjoy to play basketball.(3) we are do our homework now.(4) she is ill and eat little yesterday.(5) we all want go to universities one day.sentence (1) is erroneous because the student adds a wrong participle to the infinitive from. in sentence (2), the verb