A Comparative Study On Language Errors In English Majors’ MA Theses And BA Theses

In the course of foreign language learning, L2 learners inevitably commit various kinds of language errors. For behaviorists, errors are something to be eradicated and as errors do no good to the learning, they must be corrected without hesitation.However, contrary to the typical views by behaviorists, errors, in Corder’s(1967)view, are important in and of themselves. It takes little perception to know the fact that “human learning is fundamentally a process that involves the making of mistakes.Mistakes, misjudgments, miscalculations, and erroneous assumptions form an important aspect of learning virtually any skill or acquiring information”(Brown,2000, p.216). Though having learned English for many years, yet both postgraduates and undergraduates still let a variety of language errors find their way into English majors’ MA and BA theses. Therefore, it is necessary to study language errors in MA and BA theses. This study aims to analyze language errors in English majors’ MA and BA theses in China. By establishing two corpora, one for postgraduates’ MA theses and the other for undergraduates’ BA theses collected from 58 universities and colleges in China, the present study sets out to generalize main language errors in English majors’ MA and BA theses, to explore whether there exist significant differences in main error types and the corresponding frequencies between MA and BA theses, and then to explore the ranking order of the misuse of article errors, the most frequently committed error types both in MA and BA theses.The present study uses Turnitin to detect language errors in English majors’ MA and BA theses and then adopts SPSS to analyze statistics. The three research questions are addressed as follows:(1) What are the main language error types in MA theses and BA theses of English majors in China?(2) What are the differences of error frequency between MA theses and BA theses?(3) What is the ranking order of the misuse of articles in MA theses and BAtheses?After careful study, the research findings are summarized below:First: Main error types in MA theses are listed as follows(arranged based on the frequencies): fragment or missing comma, run-on sentences, disagreement of s/v,proofread, possessive errors, verb errors, pronoun errors, article errors, preposition errors, confused, wrong articles and wrong forms; Main error types in BA theses are presented accordingly(arranged based on the frequencies): run-on sentences,disagreement of s/v, proofread, possessive errors, verb errors, fragment or missing comma, article errors, preposition errors, confused, wrong articles and wrong forms.Second: Significant differences do exist in some language types:. fragment or missing comma, run-on sentences, disagreement of s/v, possessive error, verb error,article error and wrong articles between MA and BA theses. With reference to fragment and missing comma, run-on sentences and wrong articles, postgraduates tend to commit more errors. Nevertheless, as for disagreement of s/v, possessive errors, verb errors as well as article errors, undergraduates commit more.Third: It is shown that the ranking order of the misuse of article usage in MA and BA theses invariably takes the form of omission>redundancy>confusion and zero article> definite article>indefinite article.The present study, centering on language errors in English majors’ MA and BA theses, would throw light on future thesis writing and instructing.