A Study of Verb Errors Committed in Written English by Chinese College Students in Taiwan

The purpose of this study was to expand EFL learner knowledge of languages and to improve writing proficiency. Verbs often convey the main idea of a sentence, and are the soul of all sentences. Thus, verbs were considered a major category in this research. Verb errors constitute the highest proportions of all grammatical errors found in previous studies. However, previous studies have few discussions on verb voice errors and verb usage errors. This article investigates and analyzes Chinese EFL beginning and intermediate college student verb voice errors and verb usage errors. This article proposes using bilingual parallel corpora as a pedagogical solution accordingly. Empirical results prove that the method proposed is indeed effective. The findings of this study have potential to spread to teaching materials and especially to textbooks for foreign language writing.