Abstract
ANALYSES OF MECHANICAL ERRORS IN THE ENGLISH WRITTEN ARTICLES OF TURKISH ACADEMICS: A CASE STUDY
The mastery of academic writing in English or English as Academic Purpose (EAP) has a crucial role at Turkish universities; whereas some EAP problems still face Turkish Academics. One of the major EAP problems is ‘writing’. This study focuses on mechanical writing errors of Turkish Academics, and aims at revealing: the common errors of Turkish Academics; annual rejected article number due to English-borne troubles; and the reason of writing in English. The data were collected through 30 English written articles from 3 different universities, and analyses were done in tabulated forms. The articles collected as data were those which were turned down by the Journals due to grammatical errors. The errors found in the writings of Turkish Academics were classified under 10 categories, which were thought as the most common error types by Gaskell and Cobb (2004). The findings reveal that some error types were much more frequent than others. The results also showed that why Turkish academics insisted on writing their articles in English although they had difficulty in doing so.
Keywords
Academics, English, writing, error, article
