An Analysis Of Linguistic Errors In The Writings Of Chinese Learners Of English At Post-intermediate Level

In recent years, analyses of linguistic errors have been widely carried out with data collected from students of varying proficiency. However, systematic and in-depth analyses of linguistic errors in the writings of English majors are relatively rare for much research targeted at them has focused on errors at discourse level. The assertion repeated by such research is that the writings of English majors are abundant in errors at discourse level with no severe errors at word- or sentence-level. Grammar is no longer a problem in their writing. This paper, therefore, sets to report on an analysis of grammatical and lexical errors made in the written work of English majors in an attempt to verify such assertion. A total of 371 errors have been found in 30 essays written by sophomores majoring in English at ZJNU (Zhe Jiang Normal University). So, the findings of this study are inconsistent with the assertion. English majors are by no means free from linguistic errors. In spite of so many years of classroom instruction and ongoing study, linguistic errors are still frequent and found to be highly concentrated in some specific categories such as sense relations of lexis, collocations and phrase structures with the first two concerned primarily with lexical choice and the last one choice of articles and prepositions. It is somewhat surprising that intersentence errors corresponding to cohesion should be the least commonly occurring errors, which partly reveals that students'writing instruction has concentrated on the organization skills at the expense of the linguistic skills. Sources of the types of errors students typically make have been explored. They mainly fall into four groups, namely, interlingual errors, intralingual errors, communication strategy-based errors and induced errors. The outcome of the study yields important implications for English teaching and learning.