English Language Teaching; Vol. 8, No.

5; 2015
ISSN 1916-4742 E-ISSN 1916-4750
Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education

Frequent Errors in Chinese EFL Learners’ Topic-Based Writings

Huifang Zhan1
1
School of Foreign Languages, Beihai College of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beihai,
China
Correspondence: Huifang Zhan, School of Foreign Languages, Beihai College of BUAA, 536000 Beihai, China.
Tel: 86-138-7897-1002. E-mail: jennyzhan100@yahoo.com

Received: January 19, 2015 Accepted: February 25, 2015 Online Published: April 23, 2015
doi:10.5539/elt.v8n5p72 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v8n5p72

Abstract
This paper investigated a large number of errors found in the topic-based writings of Chinese EFL learners,
especially provided an analysis on frequent errors, to find useful pedagogical implications for English grammar
teaching and writing instruction in Chinese EFL setting. Students’ topic-based writings were examined by the
author. The findings suggest that misuse of tense and verb form was the most frequent error in Chinese students’
writings. Others include those in spelling, use of particular words and phrases, Chinese-English expression,
singular and plural form of nouns, parts of speech, non-finite verbs, run-on sentences, pronouns and so on.
Teachers should pay due attention to all of the errors, especially those frequent ones, and try to find out what
leads to those errors, thus, they may give their students effective grammar and writing instructions to help them
with English learning.
Keywords: frequent error, topic-based writing, ungrammatical pattern, Chinese EFL learners, pedagogical
implication
1. Introduction
Language teaching requires teachers to describe not only the target language (TL) but also the learners’ version
of the TL, which Corder (1971) called as learner’s idiosyncratic dialect of the TL standard and Selinker (1972,
1992) called it their Interlanguage (IL). To describe learners’ version of the TL, it is necessary to examine their
utterances. Corder (1975, p. 207) pointed out that “the study of the whole performance data from individual
learners” is performance analysis while “the study of erroneous utterances produced by groups of learners” is
error analysis (EA). This paper is to provide an error analysis on Chinese learners’ version of English in writing.
Carl James (2001, p. 1) defined a language error as an unsuccessful bit of language. He pointed that learners’
errors are a register of their current perspective of the TL (2001, p. 7). Corder (1967) made points that errors are
significant in three aspects: they tell the teacher what needs to be taught; they tell the researcher how learning
proceeds; and they are a means whereby learners test their hypotheses about the second language (L2). Johnson
(2002, p. 59) argued that errors hold vital clues about the process of EFL learning, rather like the pain that may
tell the doctor more than all the parts that do not hurt. All shows that teachers and learners will benefit from
various forms of feedback on the errors, so it is necessary to focus on language learners’ errors.
Errors are made by learners whether the language is spoken or written. English writing has become one of the
important means to test English learning results. Accuracy is regarded as a significant criterion in assessment of
English writing and plays an important role in the evaluation of English learning. However, in Chinese EFL
learners’ writings, errors are always a major factor to damage meaning and writing quality. Incorrect language
use is reported as having negative impact on non-native speakers’ perception of L2 writing quality (Johns, 1997;
Johnson & Roen, 1989; Hinkel, 2002), therefore, it is significant to have writing errors analyzed.
James (2001) points out that error analysis is the study of linguistic ignorance, the investigation of what people
do not know and how they attempt to cope with their ignorance. Learners’ ignorance of TL can be expressed in
terms of four categories: grammaticality (well-formedness), acceptability, correctness, strangeness and infelicity.
Grammaticality involves forms, context-free, while acceptability involves contexts. It is grammar who decides
whether something said or written by a learner is grammatical, and it is the users who decide whether an
utterance is acceptable. Cross-classification of them gives four possible combinations (James, 2001):
[+Grammatical (GR) +Acceptable (ACC)], [+GR -ACC], [-GR +ACC], [-GR -ACC]. Correctness is related to

72
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

the prescriptive normative standards. A piece of language, like “with Tom and I”, may be acceptable by native
speakers at first, but reflection about it may lead to judge it is rejected because “with Tom and me” is correct. Its
rejection is based on a metalinguistic decision. Strangeness and infelicity result from “linguistically strange”
word combinations (Allerton, 1990), including four types: those inherently strange (by using “glasnost” instead
of words like “openess’ or “transparency”), those semantically disharmonious (e.g. wet water), simple
ungrammaticality and locutional deviance (e.g. He was listening at me when I put the statement.). Because the
latter two can be considered as either [+G, -ACC] or [-G, +ACC], the paper mainly focus on the first two.
Apparently, errors made by EFL learners should be treated differently. Some errors may be taken with a more
liberal attitude and others have to be taken seriously. Some errors have to be EFL teachers’ priority and should be
eradicated. The aim of the study is to observe, identify and categorize Chinese EFL learners’ errors in their
English writing so as to find and analyze the frequent errors, with the hope of generalizing useful pedagogical
implication for grammar teaching and English writing in China.
2. Method
2.1 Participants and Data
Writing samples are collected from the essays written by the full-time undergraduate students of a third-rate
university in Guangxi Autonomous Region, in the southwest of China. They are English majors and in their
second year of college. They started English learning at about 9 years of age. Their English learning duration
stretches from 11 to 14 years.
Those students were asked to produce three topic writings at different times during one semester when they were
taking the course, basic English writing. The three topics are: “One of My Summer Holidays” (Writing 1), “A
Description of a Person” (Writing 2) and “Whether Students Should Be Encouraged to Go into Business”
(Writing 3), which are the three major types of writing—narration, description and argumentation. Each essay is
required no less than 200 words. 177 writings samples are collected from the students in three classes (Table 1).

Table 1. The number of writing samples from different classes

Class Writing 1 Writing 2 Writing 3 Total
Class 1 10 15 14 39
Class 2 30 19 22 71
Class 3 23 20 24 67
Total 63 54 60 177

2.2 Analysis Procedures

According to the three levels of a language, the error types are decided from three aspects: substance, text and
discourse. The former two are the major concern of this paper. When learners are operating the substance
systems, substance errors such as spelling errors and punctuation errors may occur. When learners are operating
the lexico-grammatical system to produce or process text, text errors may arise, including lexical errors and
grammatical errors. Since grammar has traditionally been discussed in terms of morphology and syntax,
grammar errors contain morphological and syntactical errors, those in word structure and in structures larger
than word such as phrase, clause, sentence and paragraphs. All subjects’ writings are reviewed elaborately from
the two levels. Error patterns are identified and the actual frequent error patterns are summarized. Identical errors
on the same words or sentences in one writing sample are ignored, but those under the same error pattern but
related to different words or sentences are calculated. Error frequency was calculated in order to identify the
most frequent errors.
3. Results and Discussion
All together 38 error types are classified. 1423 tokens of errors are collected and filed in total from all the writing
samples. Our findings show that the top six error types are in tense and verb form, spelling, use of particular
words and phrases, Chinese-English expression, singular/plural form of nouns, parts of speech. Other frequent
errors include those in non-finite verbs, run-on sentences, pronouns, clauses and so on. The error types, number
of tokens and total percentage are shown in Table 2.

73
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

Table 2. Error types and the number of tokens

No. Errors in Writing 1 Writing 2 Writing 3 Token Number Error Percentage
1 tense and verb form 72 134 171 377 26.49332
2 spelling 37 31 48 116 8.151792
3 use of particular words and phrases 43 53 20 116 8.151792
4 Chinese-English expression 24 22 43 89 6.254392
5 singular/plural form of nouns 20 38 26 84 5.903022
6 parts of speech 13 23 45 81 5.6922
7 non-finite verbs 27 22 17 66 4.638089
8 run-on sentences 24 21 21 66 4.638089
9 pronouns 5 16 20 41 2.881237
10 clauses 4 23 12 39 2.740689
11 be+ adj 8 16 11 35 2.459592
12 diction 9 17 6 32 2.24877
13 articles 8 8 15 31 2.178496
14 modal verbs 9 5 12 26 1.827126
15 collocation 5 17 3 25 1.756852
16 distinguishing words and phrases 4 15 5 24 1.686578
17 prep. 4 10 10 24 1.686578
18 capitalization 6 8 6 20 1.405481
19 voice 6 4 9 19 1.335207
20 be＋v 6 11 1 18 1.264933
21 adverbs’position 2 6 9 17 1.194659
22 fragmentary sentences 0 12 2 14 0.983837
23 comparative and superlative degree 2 8 3 13 0.913563
24 parallel structure 0 9 1 10 0.702741
25 -ed, -ing as adj. 6 3 0 9 0.632467
26 possessions 3 4 1 8 0.562193
27 prep. +ving 1 1 4 6 0.421644
28 inverted sentence 2 1 2 5 0.35137
29 emphatic sentence 0 2 0 2 0.140548
30 exclamation sentence 0 2 0 2 0.140548
31 repetition 0 1 0 1 0.070274
32 punctuation 0 1 0 1 0.070274
33 conj. 0 1 0 1 0.070274
34 dangling modifiers 1 0 0 1 0.070274
35 There be… 0 1 0 1 0.070274
36 logical order of paragraphs 0 1 0 1 0.070274
37 structure 0 1 0 1 0.070274
38 number of words 0 1 0 1 0.070274
Total 1423 100

74
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

According to our calculation, the average number of error tokens in each essay is 8.0.
3.1 Errors in Tense and Verb Form
The error in tense and verb form ranks the first among all the error tokens, which totals at 337 and accounts for
approximately 26% of all error types. Among the errors, those in tense take up about 13% while those in verb
form take up another 13%. Tense errors refer to using a wrong tense that does not correspond to the language
context (Examples a-b). Errors in verb form means that writers may know what tense should be used in the
context, but write down the wrong verb form, as a result of not knowing the correct form or forgetting to change
the verb to the needed form or changing into a wrong form (Examples c-j). Some of the examples from our data
are as follows.
a) He learned English by himself for 2 years in Beijing. (has learned)
b) I just taught them about one month. (have just taught them for)
c) It enable the students to be independent and build up their self-confidence. (enables)
d) What does my father looks like? (look)
e) She not allowed me to fool around my time. (didn’t allow)
f) She has became the most important one in my life. (has become)
g) Once you have choose the major, you should be responsible for it. (chosen)
h) Going into business is just one of the ways they choosed. (chose)
i) In a poor family, she grown up into a brave woman. (has grown)
j) I losed it. (lost)
*Note. Those underlined are erroneous bits of language and those in the brackets are one of the revised versions
according to the writers’ intention in their writings.
Verb form errors in the students’ writings can be mainly further subcategorized: a) lack or overgeneralization of
subject-verb(S-V) agreement of the 3rd person singular; b) confusion about past tense (pt.) and past participle
(pp.); c) omission of an auxiliary; d) creation of a nonexistent verb form. According to English grammar, a verb
agrees with its subject both in person and in number. The verb takes a corresponding form in terms of the subject,
but verb singularity in simple present is often forgotten by Chinese students (Example c). It is the same true of
the pt./pp. errors, which sometimes are not caused by tense, but by forgetting the forms of pt. and pp. or by
confusing them (Examples f-j). In interrogative sentences, the tense marker is often placed on the auxiliary verb
or the modal verb. In Example d, the auxiliary verb is “does”. The learner gets this part right, but he in fact
marks the tense twice—as well as having “does”, he puts an –s on the end of the verb “look”.
The errors in the S-V agreement of the 3rd person singular are prominent with totals at 94 in the data and
account for about one half of the wrong verb forms and 7% of all errors. Mistaking pt/pp as pp/pt and others take
up about 6% in all errors (Table 3).

Table 3. Errors in tense and verb form

Errors in Writing 1 Writing 2 Writing 3 Token Number Error Percentage
Tense 63 97 31 191 13.42235
rd
3 -person singular 3 29 62 94 6.605762
pt./pp. and others 6 8 78 92 6.465214

Chinese EFL learners often find difficulties in choosing tenses for contexts. They are confused by verb forms for
different tenses. One of the reasons is that Chinese Mandarin has no such conjugation. They often make errors in
choice of tenses and verb forms even they know what tense is actually used in the context.
3.2 Errors in Spelling
Spelling error is the second most frequent error type in all writing samples. Memorizing words is one of difficult
tasks for Chinese EFL learners. It is more concerned during their high school years. When students are in high
school, teachers have rigid tasks about memorizing words and rigorous check with them. Once they enter college,
most of them have much less pressure from learning. Our survey is conducted in a third-rate university in China,

75
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

whose students mostly do not have a good English foundation and they have relatively poor learning persistence.
Therefore, misspelling in writing is a serious problem. In the writing samples, some top spelling errors are as
following: alway (always), nowdays/nowaday (nowadays), ture (true) and turely (truely), unforgetable
(unforgettable), weather (whether), talktive (talkative). Other errors are embrassing (embarrassing), benificial
(beneficial), besises/beside (besides), choise (choice), cignificant (significant), ecist (exist), experince
(experience), funning (funny), heself (himself), grammer (grammar), guidence (guidance), latter (later), legand
(legend), luckly (luckily), meself (myself), ourself (ourselves), theirselves (themselves), planing (planning),
retogether (reunion), nobel (noble), sellman (salesman), strengthes (strengthness), taught (tought), strick (strict).
In some phrases, there are still spelling errors like “from than on” (then), “hit issues” (hot), “lost of” (lots of),
“quite school” (quit). Such errors include omission of a letter or more letters, reversal of letters, misselection
from two letters that can present the same sound or from two homophones, confusion in word parts like stems or
affixes because of learners’ accent or mispronunciation. It suggests that improving students’ spelling is a lasting
task for both teachers and students themselves.
3.3 Errors in the Use of Particular Words and Phrases
The misuse of some particular words and phrases ties for the second most common error in the writing samples.
Some typical words or phrases have special usages, quite different from other ones. Turton (1995, p. vii) called
them as word grammar errors, distinct from other “system Grammar errors”, and pointed out that they arise when
learners violate “rules that control the use of particular words”. Chinese students make errors frequently in such
words as “make”, “like” and “thank” (Table 4), and “let”. There are also errors in using phrases like “be afraid of
doing” or “be afraid that …” and “too …to…”

Table 4. Error frequency of “make”, “like” and “thank”

Errors in Writing 1 Writing 2 Writing 3 Token Number Error Percentage
make 3 4 1 8 0.562193
like 2 5 1 8 0.562193
thank 0 2 0 2 0.140548

There are such ungrammatical patterns in the data as the following:

a) A story made me changed my opinion. (made me change)
b) The beautiful scenery made me don’t want to go back. (not want)
c) The park just like my second home. (is just like)
d) I still thank to her real help. (thank her for her)
e) Thank God let me met her and let us became good friends. (for letting me meet her; letting us become)
f) We shouldn’t afraid of help others waste our time or believe others want to cheat us. (be afraid that helping
others wastes )
g) She was too tired to get ill. (She was so tired that she got ill.)
Errors in using the words like “happen”, “just”/”only” and “as”/”with” also occur frequently in Chinese learners’
writings, but they do not in the data. Examples are following.
h) It happened some unpleasant things. (Some unpleasant things happened.)
i) I can’t express how I feel about my mother in just words. (in only these/just in these)
j) As the development of the society, there are more and more aged people. (With)
In fact, there is another form of misuse of words. In English there are lexical categories like verbs, adjectives,
articles, prepositions and so on. There are rules that control such word types. If an adjective is used as
predicative, a copula verb precedes it. However in Chinese, the copula is often absent in such a setting, so
students always leave out the copula in English. In Chinese there are no articles, so article omission and misuse
of definite/ indefinite articles in English are very common. If all the tokens above are included in a broad type,
such an error type may be Top 2 (Table 5).

76
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

Table 5. Errors in some lexical categories

Errors in Writing 1 Writing 2 Writing 3 Token Number Error Percentage
be+ adj. 8 16 11 35 2.459592
articles 8 8 15 31 2.178496
modal verbs 9 5 12 26 1.827126
prep. 4 10 10 24 1.686578
be＋v 6 11 1 18 1.264933
position of adverbs 2 6 9 17 1.194659
v-ed, v-ing as adj. 6 3 0 9 0.632467
Prep. + v-ing 1 1 4 6 0.421644
conj. 0 1 0 1 0.070274
Total 37 56 58 151 10.61138

Examples are as follows:

a) They still willing to help people. (are still willing )
b) We went to dining hall. (the dining hall)
c) When you doing business, it’s a unknown investment. (do, an)
d) She must did it. (must do)
e) We went back to our hometown by our own. (on)
f) They both are worked in the same factory. (worked)
g) They also can learn something from failure. (can also)
h) I felt more exciting. (excited)
i) After graduated from the primary school, I know … (After graduating)
j) Tom has played guitar when he was 7 years old. (has been playing; since)
*Note. Those bits of language with double lines beneath (including those in the whole paper) are also erroneous,
but not affiliated to the error type being discussed.
3.4 Chinese-English Expression
Chinese-English expression is the fourth most frequent error in students’ writing samples. By the term
Chinese-English expression, we mean students resort to Chinese sentence structure, word order, and direct literal
translation from Chinese to English in their writing (Sun, 2014). Effects of one learning habit on another are
known as transfer in psychology. There are two sorts of transfer: positive and negative. In EFL learning, there are
both positive and negative transfer of Chinese. One factor that influences the occurrence of transfer is learner
level. It has been suggested that lower level learners are particularly prone to negative transfer because they have
fewer resources at their disposal in the target language. They rely heavily on their native language to help them
in times of trouble (Johnson, 2002:63). Our findings are in agreement with the conclusion above. For those lower
levels of English learners, this kind of errors is identified as more common. They are so greatly affected by their
mother tongue that they often ignore the basic grammatical structure of English. Whether in simple and short or
complex and long sentences, they may resort to L1 equivalents or Chinese expression in the word sequence. And
in some more complicated sentences students make more errors. Typical examples are listed as follows:
a) Don’t be polite. (Just make yourself at home)
b) It’s very waste of time. (a waste)
c) I have a great many friends. But one of them I like much better than any other. (I like one of them much more
than any others.)
d) Some people think that should not be allowed or encouraged students to go into business. (students should not
be allowed and encouraged)
In Example a, the sentence is well-formed. It is understandable and correct in Chinese sequence, but it is not

77
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

accepted in the context that someone is invited to your home for dinner and you said “Don’t be polite” in English.
For those evaluators who don not know anything about Chinese, the sentence may be absurd. Such a
word-for-word equivalent is [+GR, -ACC] in English. In Example d, it is confusing that no subject precedes the
predicate “should not be allowed or encouraged” and the word “students” follows it. It may be regarded as an
error of missing the subject and the writer’s confusion about passive and active voices. It is true, but what mainly
leads the writer to his error is word sequence of Chinese. Because when the subject “students” is omitted, the
word order in Chinese makes the sentence still understandable and correct if the learner gets the voice right
(“should not allow or encourage students”), but it is not the case in English.
It is clear that some learners have not grasped the rules well. They turn to their native language. Lado (1957:2)
put forward “contrastive analysis (CA) hypothesis” to find out what made some things easy for learners and
other things difficult: those elements that are similar to the learners’ native language will be simple for him, and
those elements that are different will be difficult. Although the claim of Lado has been disputed, it reminds
Chinese EFL teachers of being aware of the differences between Chinese and English. Wei and Fei (2003) define
Chinese English (Chinglish) as an interlanguage. They think it is usually manifested as Chinese-style syntax with
English words, Chinese phonological elements in pronunciation or grammatical variations that attempt to follow
Standard English rules but miss the rule. Chinese evaluators are sometimes also affected by their mother tongue
and they are very careful about detecting such deviant bits of English in the writings of their Chinese students
and take efforts to make them understand.
3.5 Errors in Singular/Plural Form of Nouns
The fifth frequent error is in singular and plural forms of nouns. 84 out of 1423 error tokens are identified as a
lack of singular or plural markers and disagreement, which totally account for about 6%. Chinese has no
inflections. Plural –s in English appears redundant, so “help stranger” (Example a) occurs. It’s not strange that
learners forget the marker “a/an” for singular (Example b) and sometimes irregular plural forms (Example c).
There are also both singular and plural markers, one showing the singular and the other showing the plural,
resulting in disagreement (Example e-g). In English, there are countable and uncountable nouns, regular and
irregular plural forms, which make learners confused.
a) We should help stranger. (strangers)
b) It’s really hard job. (a really hard job)
c) When child make mistakes, father … (children)
d) We can learn knowledges and gain experience. (knowledge)
e) If you are a good candidates, you’ll have more chances to be employ. (a good candidate; employed)
f) This summer holidays, … (holiday)
g) These money help a lot of people have a good life. (The money)
h) We have many free time. (much)
3.6 Errors in Parts of Speech
Chinese students are often confused by the different forms of one word, its noun, verb, adj., adv. etc. Some
words with a suffix –ly are not adv. but adj.. If words like “lack” and “respect” are used as verbs, “lack sth.” and
“respect sb.” are used, instead of “lack of sth.”, “respect for sb.”, in which “lack” and “respect” are nouns. Those
totally make Chinese learners frustrated. They mix up the different forms of a word, its noun, verb, adj., adv., if
there are any. Examples are following.
a) I become more and more confidence. (confident)
b) It will be effected not only the students’ successful but also their view of life. (affect, success )
c) No one can success so easy. (succeed, easily)
d) They lack of work experience. (lack)
e) It’s their own choose whether they help or not. (choice)
3.7 Other Error Types
Other frequent error types include those on non-finite verbs, run-on sentences, pronouns, diction, clauses, and so
forth. As for non-finite verbs, students may misuse present participle, gerund, infinitive (Examples a-c). Run-on
sentences (Examples d-e) can be revised in different patterns, by using another simple sentence or using a clause.
It depends on the writer’s intention and the context. As to the errors in personal or possessive pronouns

78
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

(Examples f-g), students may either use the objective case instead of the needed subjective, or just the reverse.
They may miss a possessive or use an unspecified reference, making the meaning vague.
a) Help someone is not difficult to us. (Helping)
b) We should help strangers and it would bring lots of benefits, such as make us more unite, make our life more
easier, make the world more peaceful. (making, united; making, easier, making)
c) The best way to integrate into society that the whole society should encourage the college students go into
business. (is that, to go into)
d) I was attracted by her smile, her smile made me feel comfortable and relaxed. (. Her smile/ , which)
e) After school, she went to teachers’ home, learned for two or three hours and then went back home, she must
finish her homework. (. She)
f) She never asked me for anything but her gave me a lot. (she)
g) Everyone has own dream. (his own)
In our data, there are errors made because of false selection. Errors in diction involve wrong choice of words and
expressions (Examples a-b). Students also confuse two or more words with similar spellings, pronunciations or
meanings like “pass”, “passed” and “past”, “respect” and “expect”, “later” and “latter”, “also” and “either”, “if”
and “whether”, “very” and “very much”, “hard”, “hard-working” and “hardly” (Examples c-g). Distinguishing
those words is similar to diction because it involves diction as well, but it is a little different from diction. When
learners make errors in distinguishing words, there is always another one word or other two or more words that
may interfere with them and lead them to make a false selection. In this aspect, students have to make clear
about them. The following are the examples drawn from our data.
a) I am the smallest granddaughter. (youngest)
b) My father often called the teacher to ask my exhibition in school. (performance)
c) I past my interview and I became a formal employee. (passed)
d) As what I respecting, summer holiday is coming. (expect)
e) It was the later. (latter)
f) If students should be allowed or encouraged to go into business has become a hot topic among people.
(whether)
g) Mr. Wen also didn’t want to leave us. (didn’t want to leave us either)
In clauses, deviance arises when there is a miss of a relative pronoun (Examples a-b), a miss of a needed subject
(Examples c-d), incorrect sequence of the subject and the verb. In Example e, it applies the interrogative
formation rule in the clause, but omits to invert the subject and the predicate.
a) I gained the most from trip is that knowing how important the parent-child relationship is. (What I gained)
b) There are some people hold opposite opinions. (some people who hold)
c) Students should choose a job suitable for their career and hope that students can enjoy their lives. (I hope)
d) This was my first time saw fireflies. (that I saw)
e) I didn’t know what did it mean. (what it meant)
4. Conclusion
This study mainly discusses Chinese EFL learners’ most frequent errors in their topic-based writings. The top six
are the errors in tense and verb form, spelling, use of particular words and phrases, Chinese-English expression,
singular/plural form of nouns, parts of speech. Other frequent errors include those in non-finite verbs, run-on
sentences, pronouns, clauses and so on. All of the errors should be paid due attention to by Chinese EFL learners
and teachers. And those frequent ones should be their priorities.
The ultimate cause of the errors is learners’ linguistic ignorance of the TL. Due to lack of declarative knowledge,
learners use strategies to compensate for their ignorance. Instead of silence, learners try to express themselves by
alternative means. In the substitutive language, inappropriate L1 transfer arises. Apart from the negative L1
transfer, the second reason for the errors is misapplying avoidance. When learners resort to L1, they find L1 can
not help, either they are ignorant of the L1 equivalent, or L1 lacks an equivalent. They turn to the
communication strategy of paraphrase and circumlocution, and their self-assessment about the alternative

79
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

version may not be right. Such errors are still caused by ignorance of the TL. Different learners who use different
strategies to cope with some feature of the TL that they are equally ignorant of may make different errors, so a
third reason for the errors are the strategies that learners use. Some other reasons may be external ones, such as
teachers’ imprecise explanations and misleading materials.
Whatever reasons cause the errors, a fact cannot be denied that errors made by learners are related to their
cognitive process. After our survey, students were told our findings and the teachers also conducted explicit
instruction on those ungrammatical errors in class once because it is believed that it may raise learners’
awareness of their errors. After the teaching practice, we find that classroom analysis and instruction are really
helpful, but not so helpful. During one or two months after instruction on the errors, students’ writings had
improved, but at the end of the semester, a large number of those errors appeared again in their final exam
writings. It can be concluded that Chinese EFL teaching has attached great importance to language points, but
obviously students do not learn well. They have difficulty in English writing. Error correction is a cognitive
process and errors cannot be removed until they have a clear awareness of them. Therefore, it is necessary for
teachers to regard the instruction as a long-term project by asking students to correct peers’ writings, handing in
their revised writings or doing some exercises like correcting sentence errors. It is also helpful to find new
approaches to help our students master language knowledge and apply it to their written and oral productions
accurately and fluently. One caveat the author needs to mention here is that due to the limited data for each
writing type and the deficiency in classification of the error types, it is necessary to conduct long-term projects to
improve English writing and English grammar teaching in China.
References
Allerton, D. (1990). Linguistically strange word combinations. In M. Bridges (Ed.), On strangeness (pp.
109-120). Tubingen: Gunther Narr.
Corder, S. P. (1967). The significance of learner’s errors. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 5(4),
161-170. Reprinted in Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and Interlanguage (pp. 1-13). Oxford: Oxford
University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/iral.1967.5.1-4.161
Corder, S. P. (1971). Idiosyncratic dialects and error analysis. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 9(2),
147-160. Reprinted in Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and Interlanguage (pp. 14-25). Oxford: Oxford
University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/iral.1971.9.2.147
Corder, S. P. (1975). Error analysis, Interlanguage and second language acquisition (Survey Article). Language
Teaching and Linguistics Abstracts, 8, 201-218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2fS0261444800002822
Hinkel, E. (2002). Teaching grammar in writing classes: Tenses and cohesion. In E. Hinkel, & S. Fotos (Eds.),
New perspective on grammar teaching in second language classrooms (pp. 181-196). New York, NY:
Routledge.
James, C. (2001). Errors in language learning and use: Exploring error analysis. Beijing: Foreign Language
Teaching and Research Press.
Johns, A. (1997). Text, role, and context: Developing academic literacies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Johnson, D., & Roen, D. (1989). Richness in writing. New York, NY: Longman.
Johnson, K. (2002). An introduction to foreign language learning and teaching. Beijing: Foreign Language
Teaching and Research Press.
Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10(3), 209-231.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1515%2firal.1972.10.1-4.209
Selinker, L. (1992). Rediscovering Interlanguage. London: Longman.
Sun, X. (2014). Ungrammatical patterns in Chinese EFL learners’ free writing. English Language Teaching, 7(3),
176-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v7n3p176
Turton, N. D. (1995). ABC of common grammatical errors: For learners and teachers of English. London:
Macmillan Education Limited.
Wei, Y., & Fei, J. (2003). Using English in China. English Today, 19(4), 42-47.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2fS0266078403004073

80
www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015

Copyrights
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

81