ERROR ANALYSIS IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING: THE CASE OF ESP FOR MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
Keywords:
Error analysis, Scientific writing, Mechanical engineering, Interlingual and intralingual errors, English for specific purposes (ESP)Abstract
The paper presents an error analysis of scientific articles written by non-native speakers of English in the field of mechanical engineering. The main research aim was to determine the most common grammatical errors and provide an explanation for their occurrence. The analysis was mainly qualitative in nature and yielded five major types of errors (related to articles, prepositions, tenses, voices, and subject-verb agreement) and a number of less frequent ones. The majority of these errors arose from interlingual interference, that is, the inadequate transfer of the authors’ first language, which was predominantly Serbian, into English. Certain intralingual errors such as those in the use of articles were also identified and described in detail. Hopefully, the results of the analysis might serve as future guidelines for both experienced and young researchers.
