A Corpus-based Analysis on Word Errors in College English Writing

Based on contrastive analysis and error analysis, this paper attempts to explore word errors committed by non-English majors in their writing collected in Chinese Learner English Corpus. The aim is to offer Chinese learners some help concerning the methods to improve their English writing level and yield some suggestions on English language teaching. The main findings are: first, out of total word errors, the most frequently occurring sub-types of word error are substitution error and part of speech error; second, the less frequent sub-types are the redundancy error and absence error; third, interlingual errors account for 72%, intralingual errors 28%. In the end, causes of the above findings were analyzed and some remedial teaching methods were suggested.