Intra-Lingual and Inter-Lingual Errors in Chinese College Freshmen’s English Writing

Abstract

In this paper, a statistical analysis was made on the errors in the freshmen’s English writing based on the English compositions collected from a Chinese 211 project university. The analytical result showed that there are mainly 13 types of errors in the English writing of China’s college freshmen, which can be categorized into “intra-lingual errors” and “inter-lingual errors”, and each of these two categories can be subdivided into “lexical errors” and “syntax errors”. Among them, the sentence inconsistency, errors in the articles, parts of speech errors or tense/voice errors take up the highest proportions. At the end, the inspirations from research results were introduced for English writing teaching.