Abstract:English teachers will confront all different kinds of errors made by students in the course of teaching. Chinese teachers and students and students believe that writing is the most difficult problem in their English learning. Many differences exist at the level of grammar syntax paragraph and text. Error Analysis has been playing an important role in second language learning. It is a branch of Applied Linguistics. It will bring great help to both language teachers and language learners. It can throw some light on the process of second language learning process. Meanwhile, it can reveal the common problems shared by the language learners through the careful study.

This paper, with Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis as theoretical guidance, tries to explore the common writing errors of one hundred compositions of English Majors of 2009 students in Xuzhou Institute of Technology. Then the author collects data and analyzes it through a tool called SPSS. At last, the reasons to these errors are put to light. 

The errors are classified into five types: lexical errors、grammatical errors、phrasal errors、sentential errors and cohesive errors.. Through analysis, we find two main factors, that is, negative transfer of mother tongue and objective choices of false understanding. Among which the former appears more frequent than the latter. Those two factors are caused by the faulty or partial learning of one item of the target language upon another and overgeneralization of the target Language, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules and false concept hypothesized.

This thesis consists of five chapters. The opening chapter, as we have just read above, generally introduces the background and significance of the study and presents a rough picture of this study. The introduction chapter is followed by the literature review, in which the author first presents the theories involved in this study—Error Analysis and Contrastive Analysis and then reviews the related studies both abroad and in China. Chapter Three gives out the research methodology and research approach. And it also brings out detailed information about error types through examples in Chapter four. The last chapter draws a conclusion, analyzing the induced factors 、correcting errors and showing us some limitations of this thesis.

Keywords:  contrastive analysis  error analysis  English writing  error correction.

Contents

Abstract

摘要

Chapter One Introduction-1

1.1 Background of the study-1

1.2 Significance of the study-2

Chapter Two  Literature Review-4

2.1 Contrastive Analysis-4

2.2 Error Analysis-4

2.2.1 Error ＆ Mistake-4

2.2.2 The theory of Error Analysis-5

2.2.3 The procedures of Error Analysis-5

Chapter Three Methodologies-8

3.1 Research objectives-8

3.2 Subjects-8

3.3 Research Approach-8

Chapter Four  Research Results-10

4.1 Lexical errors-10

4.2 Grammatical errors-11

4.2.1 Morphological errors-11

4.2.2 Syntactical errors-12

4.3 Phrasal errors-13

4.4 Sentential errors-14

4.5 Cohesive errors-14

Chapter Five Conclusion-16

References-18