An Investigation of Syntactic Errors in Chinese Undergraduate EFL Learners’ Compositions: A Cohort Study

Meihua Liu,Ying Xu

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.2n.4p.182

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of syntactic errors in English essays composed by Chinese university students. Thirty undergraduate non-English majors across disciplines produced 90 essays on three tasks during eight weeks, and answered a self-developed questionnaire at the end of the course. Analyses of the data resulted in the following main findings: (1) Among the ten types of syntactic errors, errors in tense and voice were the most frequently occurring type of errors, (2) the errors generally tended to decrease across tasks, (3) the syntactic errors of various categories were generally inversely correlated with the students’ writing performance, and (4) the errors were caused by diverse reasons, of which carelessness and the differences between Chinese and English were considered the most crucial.

Highlights

With China’s increasing economic and cultural interaction with the rest of the world, the ability to use English proficiently in the written and/or oral form proves to be a necessary skill to find or hold a job for most Chinese university graduates and other people who desire to survive an international working environment
In order to understand how well Chinese EFL learners write in English, much research has been done in the area, some focusing on the composing process, including the influence of Chinese on English writing, writing strategies, text pattern knowledge, task difficulty, and writing anxiety (Cai, 2001; Wang, 2003; Wang, 2005)
Of 1138 identified errors at sentence, paragraph and discourse levels in the 90 essays on three tasks, 622 were syntactic errors, accounting for 55% of the total number of errors, meaning that syntactic errors were the greatest challenge for the students in their English writing

Summary

Introduction

With China’s increasing economic and cultural interaction with the rest of the world, the ability to use English proficiently in the written and/or oral form proves to be a necessary skill to find or hold a job for most Chinese university graduates and other people who desire to survive an international working environment. English writing has been a nutshell to EFL learners, teachers and researchers because, despite the increasing need to write well in English, quite a number of Chinese university students cannot write effectively in English (Liu & Braine, 2005; Wang, 2005). Some studies investigate the assessment of English writing, such as raters’ bias, error treatment, and the rating process (Liu & Chai, 2009; Zhang, 2004). Thanks to these efforts, many problems existing in the English writing of Chinese EFL learners have been revealed and great improvement has been gained so far. The study examined the patterns of the syntactic errors across the three tasks, the relationship between different types of syntactic errors and the students’ writing performance, and the causes for the errors

Methods

Results

Conclusion