Abstract

In English writing, learners’ language output errors are common and even inevitable. English teachers are confronted with various kinds of output errors made by students in the course of their teaching. This paper is a study on the errors in the English writings of 13 junior non-English major students. Through Error Analysis Approach, we learn that the problems of Chinese learners of English lie mostly in grammatical and lexical level. Among the detailed items, errors concerning the collocation of words at the lexical level, transitional devices at the textual level, and paratactic sentences, concurrent structure and subjective-predicate structure at the grammatical level occur most frequently. Then detailed analysis of these errors shows that, apart from the learner’s carelessness and incompetent knowledge of the target language, mother-tongue transfer is also an important reason that causes the English learners’ unsuccessful mastery of the target language.

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