Papp (2004) analyzed a 200,000-word corpus of Chinese ESL university students’ written production and found the article system and ‘number marking on nouns’ very problematic for the students. The reason can be attributed to the fact their L1 has no articles. Tang (2004), studying the intermediate EFL learners’ collocation errors analyzed over 200 pieces of essays written by 60 junior students of Foreign Languages School in East China Jiaotong University. The criterion for defining collocation errors was the discrepancy between the conventional lexical chunks of the native speakers and the EFL learners’ version. The results showed that a large proportion of collocation errors belonged to adjective + noun, and verb + noun errors’ categories, which accounted for 21.67% and 52.5% of the total errors respectively. The analysis revealed the factors causing collocation errors in the above students were: the complexity of collocations, the negative lexical transfer of L1 and overgeneralization of collocation and, incomplete or misunderstanding of the meaning and concept of L2 words. Chan (2004) examined English writing samples of 710 Hong Kong ESL college students. The findings revealed that, in all of the five error types investigated, most errors were closely related to the subjects’ L1. Holling (2004) at The University of Texas at Austin studied a random sample of 100 eighth grade writing samples drawn from the 2002 TAAS exam administration. The final error sub-categories were organized into four major categories: Sentence Boundary (comma splice, fragment, and run-on); Mechanical (apostrophe, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling); Verbal (subject-verb agreement, verb, and verb tense); and Other Surface (article, lexical, preposition, pronoun reference, and other). The study showed, in general, the mechanical errors, such as capitalization, punctuation, and spelling were most frequent. On the other hand, verbal errors, such as subject-verb agreement and verb tense errors, were rarer. Holling 2004 also surmised that not only spoken features but punctuation rules, specifically for the use of commas and periods were also carried over from L1 into writing into L2.
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