A Corpus-based Study Of Errors In Argumentative Essays By Chinese EFL Learners

As an important branch of Applied Linguistics, Error Analysis has no doubt made great contribution to the study of second and foreign language acquisition. It not only helps researchers gain some insights into the process of language learning, but also throws some light on the strategies learners adopt while learning a second or foreign language. A quantitative and qualitative study of errors will reveal the main problems that hinder the study of the language and is beneficial for both learners and language instructors.Though a number of researches on errors have been done in Chinese EFL context, few of them are corpus-based studies. With the help of SPSS and Ant Conc, the present study, which is a corpus-based study, investigates errors in argumentative essays written by Chinese EFL learners at two proficiency levels through the use of a corpus, CEM. The present study tries to answer the following questions:(1) What are the errors and the most common errors in the argumentative essays written by Chinese EFL learners?(2) What are the differences and similarities, if any, between Chinese EFL learners of different proficiency levels in terms of the number and type of errors in their essays?(3) What is the relationship between types of errors made by Chinese EFL learners and the quality of their compositions? How does this correlate to learners’ proficiency levels?Analysis of these errors and the survey data yield the following findings:(1) Learners at both proficiency levels, TEM-4 and TEM-8, commit a great number of errors. The types of errors that rank the topic three are wd(word choice), fm(form), sn(sentence), each of which accounts for more than 10 percent. The next three types that are similar in number are tn(tense), vp(verb) and np(noun). All those errors can be classified into three categories: word-level, sentence-level and discourse-level errors. Obviously, word-level errors are in the greatest number.(2) Most types of errors are similar in number at the two proficiency levels, but the overall level of essays in TEM-8 is higher than that in TEM-4 in terms of the errors they contain. Except for two types of errors, tn(tense) and cp(pronouns in discourse), all the other fourteen types of errors appear more frequently in TEM-4 compositions than in TEM-8.(3) Most types of errors correlate negatively with the quality of argumentative essays. Only three types of errors correlate noticeably positively with writing scores in TEM-4 and one has a weak correlation with scores in TEM-8. That is to say, the number of errors learners commit reflects their proficiency levels. The more errors one commits, the lower the composition scores and the lower the language proficiency level. Also, this phenomenon is more obvious when it comes to learners at higher English level.