Corpus-based Error Analysis Of Chinese College EFL Students’ Argumentative Writing

The fast pace of globalization makes English increasingly important in peoples’ daily life and professional career. Among four basic skills in language learning, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing is always considered to be the most difficult task for English as a foreign language(EFL) learner. Therefore, EFL learners often make a great number of errors in their writing. The causes of EFL learners’ errors could be many folded: firstly, some Chinese EFL learners fail to notice the target language features because of the interferences of Chinese. Secondly, some EFL learners commonly make grammatical and lexical errors. Thirdly, EFL learners may make discourse errors due to the lack of the target language discourse exposure or adequate guidance from language teachers. In order to help language teachers and EFL learners find efficient ways to learn English writing, the present study based on the Contrastive Analysis(CA) and Error Analysis(EA) are conducted to shed lights on the nature of Chinese EFL learners’ writing.To address the research questions(1) what are the common types of errors found in the English argumentative essays of Chinese student writers?(2) what types of errors might be associated with Chinese interference? One hundred and three writing samples on argumentation from Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(the TECCL Corpus) are collected for text analysis and error analysis by the use of the software WELCTOOLS1.0. The error classification proposed by James(2001) is adopted to classify the errors, namely, substance errors, grammatical errors, lexical errors, discourse errors and Chinese English. The statistical analysis of the errors in the present study shows that the most commonly seen errors are lexical and grammatical errors, lying in the misuse of verbs, modal verbs, plural nouns and the prepositional phrases as well as the ignorance of connective words use in their written discourse.The above findings are further discussed from the perspective of native language interference, the learning environment and methods in the teaching practice of English writing. Finally, recommendations for English writing instruction and future research on the related issues are also proposed.