Error Analysis Theory Based Study Of The Errors Made By Chinese Scholars In Their Writing Of English Research Articles

Along with the process of globalization, the demand of external exchange isbecoming more and more urgent. English, as a communication tool, plays an importantrole in connecting the exchange and cooperation of technology, economy and academybetween China and other countries. Additionally, along with the increasing frequency anddeepening of the communication, English seems to be the only official language in theinternational community of scholars. However, the dominance of English in academiabrings pressure and frustration to countries like China that use English as an additionallanguage (EAL). Due to their poor English proficiency, Chinese scholars aredisadvantaged when trying to communicate in international academic circles. The lowpublication rate of Chinese scholars in international journals can be seen as one of themost salient consequence. Therefore, helping Chinese scholars to improve their Englishwriting skills has become an extremely important and urgent task.This paper presents a data-driven, pedagogical oriented analysis of a corpus of20published articles written by NNS (non-native speaker of English) scholars, which areadapted from Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering (English version) alongside acomparison corpus of20published articles written by NS (native-speaker) scholars, whichare adapted from Mechanism and Machine Theory. In addition, there is a third corpuswhich consists of150articles (assignments for academic writing class which include threeparts: introduction, abstract and conclusion) written by postgraduate students of scienceand engineering of Yanshan University. Guided by error analysis theory, this paper tries toanswer the following questions:1) What are the differences between EST (English forscience and technology) written by Chinese scholars as compared with that of nativespeakers?2) According to the theory of EA (error analysis), how many kinds of errors canbe identified in the EST written by Chinese scholars? What is the frequency of each typeof error and which kind of errors predominate?3) What are the potential factors of theseerrors? The research combines quantitative method by illustrating and calculatingfrequency of each kind of error and qualitative investigations by deducing, and analyzingdata and results in order to uncover not only the salient errors but also the potential sources of the errors. Findings show that among all kinds of errors, interlingual errors andintralingual errors are predominant, in which interlingual errors account for higherproportion (interlingual errors account for57.69%and68.21%in corpus1and corpus3respectively). Interlingual errors occur due to the negative transfer of L1learners’ mothertongue and mainly reflect in lexical level, syntactical level, grammar level and discourselevel; while intralingual errors result in the negative transfer of target language and mainlyhave four subcategories: overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incompleteapplication of rules and false concepts hypothesized.Finally, pedagogical implications have been put forward for trying to find effectivesolutions to avoid committing errors, thus to improving EST writing skills of Chinesescholars. For instance, in order to improve Chinese scholars’ basic English proficiency,reinforcing the input of English can guarantee high quality English writing outputs andreduce the occurrence of intralingual errors; cultivating English ways of thinking provedto be an effective way to eliminate cultural differences and massively avoid committinginterlingual errors. The author hopes this research may provide guiding suggestions forChinese scholars and students of science and engineering for improving their EST writingskills.