Chapter I Introduction
1.1 Background
With the fast development of global communication, English education is greatly stressed by allclasses of English educators, and it is the same with normal colleges. At the same time, some problemsthat exist in English education have appeared. As a result, college English educations need to bethoroughly reformed. For deepening college English teaching reform in our country, we should train ourstudents’ practical abilities—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For Chinese students, writing isconsidered as the most difficult one in the four basic skills in foreign language learning, because theyhave to acquire sufficient proficiency, writing skills or strategies in their own English writing classes.Meanwhile, English writing is the complex process, which involves both language and thinkingactivities. At present, a higher standard for English composition is required in all examinations, so theEnglish teachers should find out and then correct their students’ errors. At the same time, it is necessaryfor students to develop their abilities to write.Raimes (1983) has offered the reasons why writing performance of students is far from satisfactory.Writing can help our students learn and reinforce the grammatical structures, vocabulary and idioms.For language learners, writing is very important for measuring their linguistic competence, referring tothe thorough knowledge of English language, including grammatical knowledge, large vocabulary, andall kinds of writing skills. But the fact is our students prefer to spend more time acquiring the input ofknowledge rather than pay attention to the output of language. The reason is that it requires acomprehensive knowledge of English: grammar, vocabulary, and a hard process of English thinkingmode. As a result, for our students, after consuming so much time in writing, they may feel frustratedwith little progress, so they perform poorly in writing and writing tests.For many years, college students’ writing errors and error analysis have been studied by lots ofresearchers. The review mainly pays attention to some elements, such as the influence of factors inwriting, instructional methods, and their influence on writing abilities. In the field of writing, there aretwo kinds of studies: analyzing writing products and observing writing process. Some researchersattempt to use some methods to make up the gap in this area. They observe students’ writing behaviorsand interview students after finishing their writing tasks. The purpose is to gain the feedback about thesubjects’ attitudes for writing and about their own cognitive processes in writing.In the past, college students’ writing errors and error analysis have been studied by lots ofresearchers. In the following there are some findings: (1) research on the proportion of language errors;(2) research on one kind of language errors; (3) research on the common errors of writings amongcollege students. The above studies show that because of using the different samples and the differentperspectives for research, we can discover many different findings about the errors of writings amongcollege students.Some researches on English writing generally study and analyze the following contents: problemsin college students’ English writing (Zhang Zaixin, 1995; Wang Yatong, 2017; Wen Qiufang, 1998; GuoChunjie & Liu Fang, 1997), the influence of Chinese on English writing (Ma Guan，英语论文范文，英语论文题目 |
