A Study Of The Language Errors In The MA Theses Of English Majors

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex process, during which learners produce a large number of language errors. Studies of language errors play a significant role in exploring and discovering the rule of language acquisition. The studies of language errors have been carried out by many scholars and researchers at home and abroad. However, their researches focus chiefly on elementary and intermediate learners, and on the learners’compositions or existing corpus. Language errors in MA theses writing have seldom been mentioned. There are different understandings toward language errors. Error Analysis (EA) plays an important role in second language teaching and learning. It helps teachers and researchers realize the common problems and characteristics shared by language learners, which can promote the progress in language teaching. It also helps students gain some insights into the difficulties during the language learning process, which can boost their efficiency in learning. Therefore, Error Analysis is instructive for language teaching and learning; its application has been drawing increasing attention in the field of applied linguistics in recent years. In light of this, the present study is in an attempt to analyze the language errors in the MA theses of English majors based on the self-built corpus. It is hoped that frequent language errors made by English majors in MA theses and the causes of these errors are discovered.The present study makes an analysis on210MA theses of English majors from42universities in China. The language errors in these theses are diagnosed, selected, tagged and analyzed. Two research questions are accordingly addressed in this study:1. What are the frequent language errors students make in their MA theses? And what are the possible causes for these language errors?2. What are the differences of the frequent language errors made by the students of different levels of universities?Based on the discussion and analysis of the statistic data, the major findings of this study can be summarized as below:1."Article Error","Fragment or Missing Comma","Run-on Sentence","Preposition Error" and "Confused Sentence" are the top five frequent language errors in MA theses. English articles and accurate full sentences are the main focuses and difficulties in practical writing. These language errors are mainly the results of mother tongue interference, ignorance or incomplete application of the grammar rules, overgeneralization of target rules, and improper writing strategy.2. There is no statistically significant difference in MA theses between "Project211" universities and "Project985" universities; while the students of other universities tend to commit five types of language errors more frequently than those of "Project211" universities and "Project985" universities. Besides, this analysis indicates that the postgraduates of each level have language problems with the English MA writing.The findings of the present study could help the researchers and teachers know the situation of MA theses of English majors and identify the advanced English learners’ language problems in English writings. This thesis thereby offers some pedagogical implications for the teachers and postgraduates. It is also hoped that the findings and suggestions could provide some insights into language learning for Chinese students.