Reference 26

Appendix A: Compositions 27

Appendix B: Questionnaires 29

Appendix C: Interviews 31

1. Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

From the perspective of Chinese foreign language learners, writing is one of the four fundamental skills, including listening, reading and speaking. It is disputable that writing demands comprehensive application ability, which is one of the summative output in a period of study unit. Accordingly, English writing is one of difficult tasks to accomplish, for both teachers and students.

According to The New English Curriculum for Chinese Primary Schools and Junior/Senior Middle Schools (the Education Ministry of the PRC, 2011), the general goal of the new English Curriculum is making students, on the basis of the stage of compulsory education, know well of the aim of English learning, develop the ability of autonomous learning and cooperative learning, form an effective strategy and cultivate a comprehensive ability of using language. And the goals of writing for junior students are that students can collect and prepare the materials by the writing requirements; they can independently draft out short passages, messages, etc. and with the help of teachers, students can modify them; they can use common conjunctions to express sequence and logic relations; they can simply describe characters and events; they can simply write paragraphs or instructions by the charts and tables. The goals indicate that it is vital to cultivate learners’ writing ability for teachers in teaching English.

Although English teaching has achieved great progress since the new reformation of curriculum, such as the more rationality of teaching material, the occurrence of new teaching methods and the change of students’ learning strategies, students still make errors in the process of learning the foreign language, especially in writing. Several scholars have pointed out the weakness in the compositions written by the foreign language learners. Firstly, it is more difficult for them to transform the receptive skill into the productive skill. Secondly, some learners’ ability to put words into meaningful sentences is rather weak. Finally, there is no topic sentence in learners’ writing. Even if there is one topic sentence, it is not easy to identify. In consequence, English writing has drawn much attention in the field of EFL learning

The author spent two months of teaching internship in observing and teaching eighth-grade students in a junior school in Hangzhou. There are some obvious problems as follows.

Firstly, although many students have mastered a relative words and most of them have been exposed to a fairly big amount of vocabulary, they still have trouble in how to use them in their writing. They sometimes exaggerate and overuse the advanced words they look up and they repeatedly use simple words and sentences; Secondly, they work poor in organizing language and passages. Some samples of students’ writings are single piles of words and phrases. Thirdly, the errors are very typical of their study of a unit and frequently occurs in other writings. What’s more, the author also discovers that many students, including some who with a good language sense, are reluctant to write.

Therefore, it is of great significance to analyze students’ errors in writing and study their causes.

1.2 Objective and Significance of the Study

1.2.1 Objective of the Study

Since it is ineluctable to make errors during the process of learning a second language, the analysis of errors plays an important role in guiding to teach writing. EA is an important theory and approach for exploring the language learning process in SLA, especially in accordance with the learner’s developing interlanguage, which is related to the improvement of language teaching in methods and materials. Whilst, during language learners practicing writing, aiming at different types of errors and causes, teachers know about their expression habits, explanation abilities, thinking patterns and the reasons of errors, so that they can adapt and adopt corresponding teaching methods and strategies of writing, pointing out, explaining errors to assist students to assist students to avoid making errors as far as possible, to enhance their writing skills and English comprehensive competence. 初二学生英语写作的错误分析(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_55742.html