Error Analysis in English Writing of Engineering College Students Based on pigai.org

摘要

As an online English compositions revision system, pigai.org is technologically supported by corpus and cloud computing. It has offered convenience to college English-learners as well as English teachers to analyze and correct the mistakes existing in students' English writing. Based on error analysis theory and with the help of the data from pigai.org, this paper generalizes the most common and typical mistakes in 952 compositions of 215 engineering students and finds out that their mistakes mainly fall into four categories: spelling, vocabulary, collocation as well as sentences. Through analysis, we know there are two explanations accounting for this: mother tongue interference and lack of basic knowledge. Accordingly, we put forward some useful suggestions for college English teachers to improve their teaching of English writing.