| This study is undertaken to describe, classify and analyze tense errors in Chinese college English major students' writing through Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and Error Analysis. Data were collected and processed with six suites of Foxpro Programs and SPSS was also used to carry out several necessary statistical tests.989 tense errors are identified and retrieved from two subcorpora of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus): St5 and St6. These errors are first classified into sixteen English tenses with an aim to investigate the characteristics of their distribution. Based on the results obtained in the above analysis, simple present and present perfect are identified as the most problematic tenses for further analysis. The errors in the two tenses are further classified into tense choice and tense form errors and then the error distribution patterns are described and possible causes are also identified. After a further analysis, the two intralingual factors, verb salience and temporal adverbials, are found to significantly affect simple past and present perfect use and their tense marking.
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