Scilight Press

The core issues concerning the usage of tense and aspect usage are seen as significantly important (Michaelis, 1994; Swales and Feak, 2000), especially in English writing in college. This study identifies the erroneous use of tense and aspect in liberal arts students’ writing in comparison with that of engineering students’ to examine their application ability in writing and identify areas of English learning in need of intensive instruction. This paper displays the frequency rates of errors about two English tenses (the present and the past), two aspects (the progressive and the perfect) based on an on-line writing corpus of students in two majors, which leads to the result that students in both majors are more likely to make mistakes in present time and perfect aspect, liberal arts students less influenced. In addition, engineering students writing score seems to be more related to their grammatical errors than that of liberal arts students. To improve their writings, practical teaching strategies such as, being aware of cross-lingual influence, practicing grammar on context level, personalized instructions, are also provided.