However, students’ writing ability turns out to be rather poor。 Though many students master a big amount of vocabulary, they do not know how to use them in their writing, but repeatedly use simple words and phrases。 In addition, students are not good at organizing language。 A number of students' writing is merely piles of simple words and sentences。 Most important of all, there are many errors existed in their compositions, which are very typical and frequent, such as the misuses of verb tense, plural forms, third-person singular form and so on。

Nevertheless, both learners and teachers lack of the awareness of analyzing the errors。 In our country, the majority of teachers have writing class in this way: teachers assign a writing task and learners are asked to finish in the certain period of time and hand it in。 Then teachers will evaluate their compositions and give a grade。 Finally, teachers give the writing back to the learners instead of asking them to correct their errors and hand it in again in order to check whether they have understood。 Consequently, students still make lots of errors, which teachers find it hard to deal with in their teaching。论文网

1。2 Purpose and Significance of the Study

While teachers were frustrated by students' errors, the theory of Error Analysis was put forward in 1970s, which enabled people to have a brand new understanding of errors。 From the perspective of Corder (1967), errors were of great significance in language learning and teaching, and they were no longer considered harmful or the useless form。 Many researchers regard the error as a meaningful sign in the studies of language learning and teaching, for the reason that learners can be aware of whether they have grasped the rules of the target language or not, and as for teachers, they can come up with corresponding instructional strategies by analyzing students' errors。 

Throughout the history of researches on Error Analysis, there are a large number of empirical studies on error analysis of writing at home and abroad。 However, those studies mainly take students who major in English and those who are non-English majors as the research subjects as well as the college and senior high school students, but this kind of research on junior middle students is few。 Nevertheless, junior middle students’ English learning still belongs to the initial stage, if we begin to analyze the errors of this period, classifying and exploring the possible causes of the errors, it will be of great importance to help teachers turn students’ errors into teaching resources of classroom and enact corresponding strategies, thus improve their teaching and more importantly, reduce the occurrences of students’ errors。 

All in all, this study aims to collect students’ English writing in junior three, categorize and analyze the possible causes of students’ errors in their writing by adopting the five steps of Error Analysis。 More importantly, the study also gives some effective ways to correct errors and teach English writing, which will be of great significance to help students enhance their writing proficiency, and improve teachers’ teaching of English writing。

1。3 An Outline of the Paper

This paper is composed of five chapters。 

Chapter One mainly introduces the background of this study as well as the purpose and significance of the study。 It ends up with an outline of the paper。 

Chapter Two presents the literature review of errors and the theories of Error Analysis and Interlanguage。 Some related studies on Error Analysis of writing both at home and abroad are also included。 

Chapter Three introduces the research methodology including the research questions, participants, instruments and the research procedures。 

As for Chapter Four, it concentrates on the data analysis of the students’ writing samples and the questionnaire, and conducts the academic discussion。