A Corpus-based Study On The Writing Errors In160Chinese Home-made Engiish Academic Journals

Of the four important language skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, in one’s second language learning, writing is regarded as the most complicated skill. A lot of attention has been paid to the English writing of college students in recent years with many linguists and scholars from home and abroad conducting analysis at different linguistic levels, in different approaches and from various perspectives. However, few studies have been carried out to discuss the writing of English journals, most of which are written by academic researchers who are specialized in engineering, medicine, aeronautics, meteorology, etc. People generally hold that the already published journals could not have any necessity for any error analysis. However, reports have been seen to claim that160out of about240kinds of registered Chinese home-made English journals were scrutinized in language and editing quality and112of them regarded as unqualified. Actually, no one can deny that the language quality of English journals in China is of great significance in measuring the academic competence of Chinese scholars. The low language qualities of Chinese home-made English journals suggest the English writing problems of Chinese researchers are so severe that those problems are being barriers for them to actively get involved in international academic communications.This research tries to find answers to the following two questions:(1) What are the rules for the main errors that writers of Chinese home-made English journal articles are inclined to make?(2) What are the possible sources of those frequently made errors? Based on error analysis theory, the research is aimed to find out the significant errors in the writings of English journals by building a corpus with materials mostly from the first issue of the160English journals in2007and several from the other issues of the same year for those whose first issues are not available and then tagging the errors of the corpus. With the use of retrieval software Antconc, errors at the substance, morphology, lexis, syntax, discourse and cohesive level are found out, calculated and analyzed. It can be concluded that that there are altogether3019errors in the160 scrutinized journals. And lexical error, morphology error and syntax error are the three kinds of errors which are mostly committed by writers, occupying31.77%,21.23%, and23.35%of the total respectively. The author further summarizes those common errors and attempts to explore the error sources. The research indicates that inter-lingual errors and intral-lingual errors are two main factors. In addition, the writers’lack of input and writing practice and editors’deficiency of English capacity also result in the large quantity of errors.At the end of the paper, some pedagogical implications are provided with the purpose of improving the quality of the teaching of academic English writing in China.