A Corpus-based Error Analysis Of English Abstracts In Chinese Academic Journals

The abstract is an essential part of research articles which summarizes the main content of the whole article. The UNESCO requires that all scientific papers published in languages other than English should be submitted with an abstract written in English so as to make international academic communication more convenient. Therefore, the standardization, clarity and accuracy of the abstract may directly influence the retrieval rate and the citation rate of the research article, and decide whether the article can be collected by international index databases, such as SCI (Science Citation Index), EI (Engineering Index) and so on. However, the fact is that various types of errors and mistakes are found in the English abstracts in some published Chinese academic journals. Lu Jianping and her team examined 50 kinds of domestic academic journals issued in 2011 and found that only 6 kinds reached the required standard and 44 of them were unqualified, which proves the poor quality of English abstracts in some Chinese journals and indicates that language problem has become a major obstacle to the international academic communication of Chinese scholars.In the research, the Corpus of English Abstracts in Chinese Academic Journals (CEACAJ) is built on the basis of the quality examination report by Lu, and errors in the corpus are tagged with their specific categories. Within the framework of Error Analysis (EA), this study is aimed at answering the following three research questions: (1) what are the common or typical error types Chinese scholars tend to make in the writing of English abstracts? (2) what are the patterns or features of these frequent error types? (3) what are the possible sources of the frequently occurring errors? To find answers to these questions, the corpus is manipulated with the WordSmith Tool to work out the frequencies and percentages of errors at substance, lexis, morphology, syntax and discourse level respectively. In the final part, the study attempts to explore the causes or sources of the most frequent errors.The results show that there are in total 5,258 cases of error found in the abstracts examined, and among them, substance error takes up the largest proportion, accounting for 27.14% of the whole, while syntax error ranks the second with a percentage of 25.64% and lexical error the third with 19.17%. Through in-depth analysis, the sources of these errors fall into three categories:(1) negative transfer of mother language, or the so-called interlingual factor; (2) intralingual factors; (3) deficiency in knowledge of English language or incautious attitudes of the writers or the editors.This thesis is of both academic and pedagogical significance in that, on the one hand, it will shed light on how to write a grammatically correct abstract and thus to improve the quality of Chinese academic journals, which helps to promote the academic exchange between Chinese and foreign researchers, and on the other hand, it gives a clue on how to adjust English learning and teaching methods in China to make them more efficient, and provides some plausible suggestions for the ongoing educational reform.