A Corpus-based Study Of The Language Errors In English Majors’ MA Theses

Among the basic language skills, writing is probably the most integrated anddemanding one. In addition to developing an idea, learners need also resort tovocabulary, grammar, syntactic and textual knowledge in a writing task. As a result,even advanced learners like postgraduates majoring in English may still commit errorsin writing. Master of Arts (MA) theses are the result of learners’ three years of academicwork as well as over ten years of English learning. An excess of language errors thereinwould undoubtedly affect the overall quality of the theses and may also arouse aversionin the Thesis Defense Committee. Although there are a number of studies on learners’language errors in the field of second language acquisition, few have investigated thelanguage errors in English majors’ MA theses. The present study is thus in an attempt togain a knowledge of the frequent errors and their causes in the hope of helping learnersto raise awareness to improve the quality of MA theses, and helping teachers to devisenew ways for remedial teaching.In accordance with the purpose of the study, two research questions are addressedbelow:(1) What frequent language errors do English majors make in their MA theses?(2) What are the possible causes of the frequent errors?The answers are sought by analyzing the504MA theses selected from Corpus ofEnglish Majors’ MA Theses with the help of the automatic error-detection function ofthe online system Turnitin and by interpreting the questionnaire and interviewconcerning the causes of the errors. The theses analyzed are equally represented by thethree levels of universities in China (“Project985” universities,“Project211”universities and “Other” universities) to see whether significant difference in errorsexists among them. In response to the research questions, some findings of the study aresummarized in the following:(1) MA students of English still make a lot of errors in their theses. Among all theerrors detected by e-rater of Turnitin, article error, sentence fragment, run-on sentence and preposition error are the most frequent types. Besides, the error distributions of thethree levels of universities generally follow the same pattern as that of the whole. Thereis no significant difference in the errors among the three levels of universities exceptbetween “Other” universities and the other two levels of universities in sentencefragment, and between “Project985” and “Project211” universities in preposition error.(2) Possible causes of these errors include incomplete knowledge of a certaingrammatical item, casual attitude towards uncertainties, negative thinking patterntransfer from Chinese, carelessness in writing and reviewing, and lack of genreknowledge.After identifying learners’ areas of difficulty and investigating the causes, a seriesof implications are pointed out accordingly in the hope of helping improve learners’writing performance in MA theses as well as on other occasions.