Revisiting the Linguistic Errors in the Writing of the Students Majoring in English

The basic writing skills ability of the students newly admitted to the English Department was still poor in terms of the grammatical aspect, choice and use of words, and phrase construction. This study reexamined the linguistic errors of the English Department students' writing. A total of 67 writing papers were randomly selected out of 125 writings of the 6th semester English Department students which were written in class in a 60-minute time. Their writings were then entered into word processing to identify the types of errors using the Linguistic Category Taxonomy. They were grouped into verb tenses, verb forms, modal auxiliary, sentence structure, word order, connectors, passive construction, subject-verb agreement, determiners, number, mechanics, dictions, preposition, and unclear ideas. Of 1080 sentences contained in students' writings, only 299 sentences (27.69%) were grammatically correct. The most types of errors found were sentence structure (20.71%), verb tense (19.64%) and verb form (15.64%). Other categories were less than 10%. Of these errors, 62.29% are attributable to intra-lingual transfer and 37.71% to inter-lingual transfer errors. These findings become the basis for designing and developing materials and strategies for writing course at the second years. The finding of this study may provide some guideline for the teachers in writing and grammar courses.